| By :
Dirik Hameed
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) in a contract between a business web hosting provider and a business defines the level of service that the provider will give to the business. Levels of service can include a variety of different aspects, for example an estimate of the time between failures, the time it takes to do a system recovery and how fast data transfer will occur. An important consideration is the stated minimum and target levels of service in the SLA. The guaranteed service level a business web hosting provider will give a customer is referred to as the minimum service level but the target level is what the provider endeavours to offer a customer. An effective SLA should involve some form of penalty if the host does not deliver the minimum service levels. For instance a minimum service level can be guaranteed 100% uptime for cloud hosting. If downtime occurs then the customer should be compensated, for example by being refunded a certain percentage of the hosting fee for each hour of downtime experienced. Alternately with a target level of service, such as replacing faulty hardware within two hours, if the hardware is only replaced within five hours the provider has not violated the SLA because two hour replacement is a target, not a minimum guarantee. When it comes to business web hosting having a good SLA and uptime is vitally important as poor levels of service and long periods of downtime will impact the revenue of a business. When customers of a business have difficulty accessing the business's website they are likely to go elsewhere for the product or service being offered by the business. Even a few minutes of downtime or accessibility trouble can cost a business a large amount of lost revenue. Both small and large businesses need a good SLA between themselves and the business hosting company which includes a good level of uptime. A poor quality business web hosting provider will negatively impact the huge earning potential of large businesses and make it very hard for smaller businesses to grow because of extensive downtime and low levels of technical support. The ability to cultivate customer loyalty is vital for businesses. A service such as cloud hosting for example is an attractive service for businesses as it has a reputation for uptime reliability and flexibility which assists businesses in providing reliable service to their customers. Likewise a 24/7 technical support service also assists businesses to develop customer loyalty because the business should have any hosting problems fixed quickly which means a minimum disruption to customers. Having 100% uptime for cloud hosting is in no way guaranteed if it is only a target service level and being able to contact technical support at any time of the day or night is not helpful if they take a long time to solve problems. It is therefore important to ensure not just that the target levels of service in an SLA are good but more importantly that the minimum levels are excellent.
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