Last time I checked the standard SLA is actually 99 % and the only compensation you get for downtime is a refund. Which is why I don't use AWS for anything mission critical.
> Following my ill-defined "Tarsnap doesn't have an SLA but I'll give people
credits for outages when it seems fair" policy, I credited everyone's Tarsnap accounts with 50% of a month's storage costs.
So in this case the downtime was roughly 26 hours, and the refund was for 50% of a month, so that's more than a 1-1 downtime refund.
Most "legacy" hosts do yes. The norm used to be a percentage of your bill for every hour of downtime once uptime dropped below 99.9%. If the outage was big enough you'd get credit exceeding your bill, and many would allow credit withdrawal in those circumstances. There were still limits to protect the host but there was a much better SLA in place.
Cloud providers just never adopted that and the "ha, sucks to be you" mentality they have became the norm.
Depends on which service you're paying for. For pure hosting the answer is no, which is why it rarely makes sense to go AWS for uptime and stability because when it goes down there's nothing you can do. As opposed to bare metal hosting with redundancy across data centers, which can even cost less than AWS for a lot of common workloads.
Theres literally thousands of options. 99% of people on AWS do not need to be on AWS. VPS servers or load balanced cloud instances from providers like Hetzner are more than enough for most people.
It still baffles me how we ended up in this situation where you can almost hear peoples disapproval over the internet when you say AWS / Cloud isn't needed and you're throwing money away for no reason.
There's nothing particularly wrong with AWS, other than the pricing premium.
The key is that you need to understand no provider will actually put their ass on the line and compensate you for anything beyond their own profit margin, and plan accordingly.
For most companies, doing nothing is absolutely fine, they just need to plan for and accept the occasional downtime. Every company CEO wants to feel like their thing is mission-critical but the truth is that despite everything being down the whole thing will be forgotten in a week.
For those that actually do need guaranteed uptime, they need to build it themselves using a mixture of providers and test it regularly. They should be responsible for it themselves, because the providers will not. The stuff that is actually mission-critical already does that, which is why it didn't go down.
Been using AWS too, but for a critical service we mirrored across three Hetzner datacenters with master-master replication as well as two additional locations for cluster node voting.
