Questions on Refunds SLA

SenseiSteve

SenseiSteve

HD Moderator
Staff member
On dedicated servers and collocation no full refund will be honored -- the 45 day money back guarantee does not apply. We reserve the right to refund a prorated amount or no refund at all.

Each of HostGator's managed shared and reseller servers carry a 45 day unconditional money back guarantee on them. If you are not completely satisfied with our services within the first 45 days of your service, you will be given a full refund of the contract amount. Remember, this is only for monthly shared or reseller packages and does not apply to dedicated servers, administrative fees, install fees for custom software, or domain name purchases.
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HostGator

"97-Day Money-Back Guarantee" offer only applicable to credit card or Google Checkout payments for shared web hosting. Other forms of payment are non-refundable. Dedicated server payments are non-refundable
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DreamHost

I threw out these two quotes strictly as examples of Terms of Services. Are you aware of any hosts that have full refunds for dedicated or colocated services for downtime or other? For example, if you're down for 24 hours in any month, do they offer a 100% refund for that months services?

Looking to see if there is any industry standard?
 
For downtime yes, if SLAs say so. I believe there are some who give refunds based on Money Back policies on servers, but not sure which.
 
Most of the so called guarantees I have seen usually cover themselves by claiming it only applies to "network" downtime and not "server" downtime.
 
Which is correct since if it covered server downtime, the provider would be bleeding money. Customer can screw something up and have the server to go offline for 20 hours.

Perhaps it's better to say that the provider should also cover server outages caused by the datacenter.
 
Most shared hosting gives you credits for your downtime, not actual refunds. If you are on a dedicated then you are responsible for the server. the only time they would consider the credit is if the network had any type of downtime.
 
Does anyone know specifically of any provider that offers a 100% money back offer on network outages on dedicated or colocated services? I haven't found any, but I'm sure they're out there.
 
ayksolutions said:
Which is correct since if it covered server downtime, the provider would be bleeding money. Customer can screw something up and have the server to go offline for 20 hours.

Perhaps it's better to say that the provider should also cover server outages caused by the datacenter.
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If we are talking a shared server though, the host should be responsible regardless of whether or not it's the server or the network.

People signing up for an account expect their site to be online. I doubt they care much if downtime is server related or network related.

In the case of dedicated or VPS then of course only network downtime should be compensated for, unless of course there is an issue on the DC end that is server related, IE: bad drive.
 
In the case of dedicated or VPS then of course only network downtime should be compensated for
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and the question is how much compensation - prorated or 100% ?? I ask because I was recently told the industry standard is 100% and I'm just not seeing that anywhere.
 
Most hosts do not offer refunds on dedicated servers because they incur non-refundable fees to get you setup (ie. racking fee, colocation fee, etc.)
 
Dedicated hosts don't cover server downtime, only network downtime. But, it depends on the host on what kind of refund you get. Some hosts give you credits as others said, and some will you give you a refund based on the downtime time frame.
 
Thanks Romes - exactly what I was looking for. Ours are prorated - just making sure we weren't off the wall or out of whack with the rest of the industry. :D
 
Not so sure the industry standard is 100%.
Pro-rated seems to me to be a far more sensible business model.
I would be interested to hear from anyone who has actually received 100% refunds based on downtime from hosts who offer it.
 
no problem steve. I myself pro-rate an account depending on the downtime time frame, server issues, etc. But, you have to investigate each refund request.

I've had my share of people who want a refund becuase they don't want pay for another month. What they do is get a refund and move to a different host. They get a refund there and move on.

So, it's best to find out why before you go and give them a refund. Just my 2 cents.
 
Prorated would make perfect sense in a world where the positive value of uptime would be equal to the negative value of downtime. That's not the case though.

To use an extreme analogy, the price of a penicillin treatment may be say $100, but the lack of it, or even part of it, could have consequences beyond any conceivable monetary value. A prorated refund for failure to deliver it on time would be ridiculous. Even a full refund is pointless. Downtime is similar, keeping the right proportions of course.

Anyway, as an example of a type of refund policy, here's Liquidweb's:
Network SLA Remedy
In the event that Liquid Web does not meet this SLA, Dedicated Hosting clients will become eligible to request compensation for downtime. If Liquid Web is or is not directly responsible for causing the downtime, the customer will receive a credit for 10 times ( 1,000% ) the actual amount of downtime. This means that if your server is unreachable for 1 hour (beyond the 0.0% allowed), you will receive 10 hours of credit.
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Quoted from http://liquidweb.com/about/dedicatedsla.html

Of course, once you take all the exceptions into account (which I did not quote as they're a bit too long), there's little value to the SLA (IMHO), but that didn't stop me from using them.

People signing up for an account expect their site to be online. I doubt they care much if downtime is server related or network related.
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Word of truth there. People can understand a certain event (meteor crushing the data center :P), but in most cases, downtime is still downtime, regardless of cause.
 
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Absolutely agree. Downtime needs to be avoided - period. It'll adversely affect new business, and alienate existing customers. I love the analogy, but it is extreme. :D
 
I don't know about initial purchase but for long-term on SLA you need your own monitoring service :rolleyes2
With the cost of set-up and provisioning a dedicated and the super-low offers used to lure customers in they probably can't afford a refund on a dedicated unless you pay full-price for one somewhere.

It's amazing the difference in downtime when it comes to refunds :uhh:

But my provider has only disagreed once, I sent them the Alertra report and instant refund...usually I try to upgrade before we have hardware related downtime but these days there are lots of older servers out there going at bargain prices...you just don't know how many hours are on them. :shaky:
 
ldcdc said:
To use an extreme analogy, the price of a penicillin treatment may be say $100, but the lack of it, or even part of it, could have consequences beyond any conceivable monetary value. A prorated refund for failure to deliver it on time would be ridiculous. Even a full refund is pointless. Downtime is similar, keeping the right proportions of course.
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A company would never be able to offer compensation other than downtime. Revenue lost is strictly at the expense of the site owner regardless. It's the cost of doing business.

As a restaurant owner I always purchased loss of revenue insurance in the event of unforeseen downtime.
 
Blue said:
A company would never be able to offer compensation other than downtime. Revenue lost is strictly at the expense of the site owner regardless. It's the cost of doing business.

As a restaurant owner I always purchased loss of revenue insurance in the event of unforeseen downtime.
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Exactly, the maximum exposure is the money paid for the service, not the value of the site's contents to it's owner or their revenue projections. This is normally addressed in most Terms of Service.
 
A company would never be able to offer compensation other than downtime.
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Which due to hosting being so cheap, tends to be a negligible amount, so I don't care for the SLA. If I have a hobby site and it is online 50% of the time, the 50% refund, or even 100% refund, would still be worthless to me.

Insurance -- indeed, the host cannot cover that.
 
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