Show HN: Calculate how long your website/API can be down
Ah, SLAs. It seems to me from having read quite a few standard sorts of ones for web systems or APIs that they’re a profitable racket, typically a total scam.<p>Simplifying and extrapolating, it seems to me that they normally boil down to this: “if our product that you pay us $1,000 per month for, upon which you depend so that you would incur losses of $1,000 per <i>hour</i> if it was down, goes down¹ for more than 43 minutes in any given month (half an hour of downtime is all hunky dory, right? 99.9% looks good, right?), we’ll give you back 10% of your monthly fee for every hour it’s down, up to your monthly fee (so now from minute 43 for the next ten hours you’ll only lose $900 per hour!)”.<p>From the ones I’ve seen, I can’t understand why anyone would <i>pay</i> for them, because they seem to be utterly toothless.<p>I mean seriously, I’d prefer to offer that kind of SLA to all users on any product at no cost: it shows I’m <i>serious</i> about the product and <i>care</i>, and practically costs little (the absolute disaster case is a month’s revenue) and can be perceived as a goodwill gesture if it ever needs to be invoked.<p>The idea of charging people extra just to say “yeah, I’ll actually <i>provide</i> the service you already paid for” rubs me the wrong way. But I bet some business types would baulk at not having this SLA line they can upsell on.<p>Am I being unreasonable?<p>¹ For some excessively strict definition of “down”, so that we might only count half of the <i>actual</i> downtime.