An SLA is not insurance and not a certificate. It is an agreement about what happens when something breaks: how quickly someone responds, how quickly it has to run again, who you call, and what happens when that is not met.

Without such an agreement you still get help, only in order of arrival. On a Sunday evening that is precisely the sentence you do not want to read.

The three words that matter

Response time. How quickly you hear from someone. Not the same as solved. With us that is within one working hour on weekdays, and within half an hour day or night on the heaviest package.

Resolution time. Within how long it runs again or there is a workaround. Note that word workaround: sometimes the fastest fix is switching something off temporarily, and that counts.

Priority. What is urgent? It looks like the easiest question and it is the most important one. A response time means nothing if nobody agreed in advance what counts as urgent.

Set priorities in advance

The classification that works in practice:

  1. Critical. Nobody can get in, no orders are coming through, production has stopped. This goes before everything, even if someone is in the middle of other work.
  2. High. Part of it does not work and there is no workable detour. Annoying, but the business keeps running.
  3. Normal. Something does not work as intended and there is a workaround.
  4. Wish. It works, it could be nicer. That belongs in ongoing development, not in the outage agreement.

You make that classification together, and you write examples from your own company next to it. Without examples you end up arguing about whether something is critical at the exact moment it goes wrong.

Questions to ask before you sign

  • Who do I get on the line outside office hours, and is it someone who built it?
  • What happens when the response time is not met?
  • Are updates, monitoring and backups included, or do they arrive separately on the bill?
  • Does the monthly price include development hours, and do those expire at the end of the month?
  • Does the agreement also apply when the outage sits with a third party, such as your hosting provider or a supplier?

Why there is an hourly rate and a monthly fee

That confuses people. The monthly fee pays for availability, monitoring, updates and backups. That work continues whether you call or not. The hourly rate applies to building new things.

We do not work with prepaid bundles, because those lead to hours that expire and to clients inventing something in December to use them up. You pay for availability and maintenance, not for a balance.