Isn’t that typical for basic retail services? You won’t get compensation for lost profit if the electricity goes out or your ISP quits routing your packets for a few hours. At least not with a standard service contract. You can negotiate something with real penalties if you’re big enough, but it won’t be cheap.
Re:Ask HN: Is ChatGPT down?
by crazygringo on Thursday December 26, 2024 @10:25PM
(#42519705)
Yeah, I don't know anyone who assumes they'd be compensated for lost profit.
That would be something entirely different -- buying a form of insurance, basically, that would be expensive.
SLA's aren't meant to make your whole as a business, generally speaking. They're meant to incentivize the provider to take uptime really seriously, so that downtime eats some of their profit. Which means you can take their expected uptime estimates as a decent ballpark.
The Crowd Strike recompense
Not your lost profit!
Everyone assumes the latter -- that they'll be compensated -- but in reality they'll be refunded $3.27 for the storage account that's got a few gigabytes of ultra-critical build scripts and static web content, without which their multi-million dollar business stops dead.
"We can refund you with loose change, or a gift card for a coffee."