| By :
Dirik Hameed
When a business and a business web hosting provider agree on the level of service that the host will provide to the business this is known as a service level agreement (SLA). An SLA can cover many different areas, for instance the estimated average time that will elapse between system failures, the time it will take to carry out a system recovery and data transfer speeds. Bear in mind the differences between the minimum service levels and the target service levels as defined in the SLA. A minimum service level refers to the least amount of service a business hosting company has to provide to a customer but a target service level is the level of service a hosting company aims to deliver. An effective SLA should involve some form of penalty if the host does not deliver the minimum service levels. A minimum service level can for example be 100% cloud webhosting uptime guaranteed by the host. 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. The host is under no obligation to reimburse a customer in any way if they do not achieve target service levels stated in the SLA, for example changing hardware after the stated target time period. It is important for business web hosting clients to ensure there is a good SLA between them and the host because if not they can experience poor service and long periods of downtime, which negatively affects business earning potential. 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. Just a short duration of downtime or associated website problems can mean a business loses out on a great deal of potential revenue. Both small and large businesses need a good SLA between themselves and the business hosting company which includes a good level of uptime. Small businesses will struggle to grow if they experience poor technical support and extended downtime for their websites and large businesses can lose a great deal of revenue through poor service from their business web hosting provider. The ability to cultivate customer loyalty is vital for businesses. Cloud hosting may seem like a good option for businesses who want to offer reliable and flexible service to customers in order to build loyalty because cloud hosting has a reputation of having great uptime and flexibility. Another way to build customer loyalty is to ensure any website disruption they experience is kept to a minimum by having a business web hosting provider who offers 24/7 access to a technical support team who can solve problems quickly. 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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