Once cloudflare.com came back I decided to check out their business SLA, and it's not very encouraging:
> For any and each Outage Period during a monthly billing period the Company will provide as a Service Credit an amount calculated as follows: Service Credit = (Outage Period minutes * Affected Customer Ratio) ÷ Scheduled Availability minutes
So assuming an outage affects 100% of your users (this one seems like it did, but that's not clear), they only refund the time the service was offline? According to pingdom this outage lasted ~25 minutes, so that's 25/(31 * 24 * 60) = .056% of our bill, roughly 11 cents.
It sounds like you just don't pay for the time the service didn't work, which isn't much of a guarantee, that's just expected (of course you shouldn't pay for services not provided). Most SLAs for critical services have something like under 99.99% uptime you get 10% of your bill back, under 99.5% you get 20% back, under 99% you get 50% back. (*Numbers completely made up to demonstrate the concept.)
Am I misreading this? Morning coffee hasn't kicked in yet so maybe I am.
This doesn't surprise me at all - SLA's are widely overrated. No SLA will cover damages incurred by lost business due to an outage. What you likely want is some kind of third-party insurance for downtime caused by outages out of your control - but I'm not even sure this exists.
I'm definitely not suggesting CF should cover losses. Sorry if I gave that impression. That would effectively require them to be an insurance company since they'd have to investigate claims, and possibly charge customers differently based on risk. (i.e. you don't want to bill a customer $200 per month if 10 minutes of downtime could lose $20 million in sales.)
I mean something like Amazon EC2's SLA (https://aws.amazon.com/compute/sla/) where credits are proportional to downtime, but not 1:1. i.e. they credit 100% for >= 5% downtime. With Cloudflare's SLA, 5% downtime (1.5 days in a month) would only give you a 5% credit.
There are different types of contingent business interruption insurance available. If you're large enough (like Fortune 500), you can negotiate the terms of your policy.
> In the rare event of downtime, Enterprise customers receive a 25x credit against the monthly fee, in proportion to the respective disruption and affected customer ratio.
That's the business SLA. The Enterprise one is 100% uptime with a 25x payback so those are the ones they are focusing on keeping up. We were with Verizon before CloudFlare and their SLA was a similar pay back for outage. I think this is pretty typical, what service did you have that had a different setup for the SLA?
* 99.0% <= uptime < 99.9%: 10% service credit
* 95.0% <= uptime < 99.0%: 25% service credit
* 0.0% <= uptime < 95.0%: 100% service credit
But CloudFlare's Enterprise SLA (25x credit) is similar or maybe even a little bit better (because you get to 100% at 96% instead of 95%). Of course when you are doing an Enterprise deal you can negotiate for whatever terms are mutually acceptable as long as you're willing to pay.
In any case, the function of the credit policy is to ensure there is enough pain for the provider to put in place the quality / reliability practices, process and code to protect themselves from losses. IMO most sustainable business pull in much more revenue per hour than 25x their CDN cost.
It would be interesting to know how CloudFlare's infra and processes differentiate free, Business and Enterprise customers.
I left Cloudflare for AWS a long time ago despite CF's affordability since they didn't seem to care that much about uptime or quality. Their frontend was corrupting response bodies + caching response bodies (in retrospect, this was probably pre-discovery cloudbleed) and there was no way to get a response or help with it.
> For any and each Outage Period during a monthly billing period the Company will provide as a Service Credit an amount calculated as follows: Service Credit = (Outage Period minutes * Affected Customer Ratio) ÷ Scheduled Availability minutes
- https://www.cloudflare.com/business-sla/
So assuming an outage affects 100% of your users (this one seems like it did, but that's not clear), they only refund the time the service was offline? According to pingdom this outage lasted ~25 minutes, so that's 25/(31 * 24 * 60) = .056% of our bill, roughly 11 cents.
It sounds like you just don't pay for the time the service didn't work, which isn't much of a guarantee, that's just expected (of course you shouldn't pay for services not provided). Most SLAs for critical services have something like under 99.99% uptime you get 10% of your bill back, under 99.5% you get 20% back, under 99% you get 50% back. (*Numbers completely made up to demonstrate the concept.)
Am I misreading this? Morning coffee hasn't kicked in yet so maybe I am.