Champagne Tastes, Beer Pocket Money

Dan Farber laments that our favorite web services are far from the "five 9s" - SLA of 99.999% availability

"Skype (eBay), Cisco, salesforce.com, Yahoo, Google, Netflix, Six Apart, Craigslist, ZDNet and other CNET site–the list goes on of sites that have suffered more than a few hours of downtime for various services."

Of course, it would be nice to have that predictable an up-time, response time and other service levels. But are we willing to pay for it? And what is the rebate if delivery fails?

Corporations which pays lots to EDS and IBM and other outsourcers have most of their applications supported less than 100 hours a week (out of possible 168). Of course, global order entry, network, card processing and other systems stay up most of the time, but even there, there is plenty of downtime for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. 

And they cost an arm and a leg in redundant, mirrored infrastructure. And when they do not meet the service level, the penalties and rebates are surprisingly low in most outsourcing contracts.

Of course, it is irritating when Sykpe or salesforce.com is down. But let's get real? Do we want to pay Verizon or IBM pricing for these services?