Comment by hedora

In my experience, FastMail has better uptime than any of the stuff work relies on. (It feels like one more nine, but I haven’t checked.)

Maybe you could have them randomly suspend your accounts for a few hours here and there to match the public cloud experience. :-)

Edit: Here’s their outage page, which reports > 2-3 nines for most subsystems most months:

https://fastmailstatus.com/

Note that they treat any service degradation as downtime when computing 9’s. For instance, they had one imap server down today, which meant some requests were failing, and that counts against their reported numbers.

By this metric: “One machine is failing requests”, most of the hyperscalers are down all the time.

Regarding actual SLAs with money and stuff: How much is the refund worth vs. the cost of downtime?

Edit 2: Take github for example. They have unreported outages all the freaking time. Down detector says push/pull has been flaky for the last 24 hours, but the official status page says all systems operational, with a minor codespace outage yesterday.

Compare:

https://www.githubstatus.com/

To:

https://downdetector.com/status/github/

To prove those aren’t all false reports, next time they go offline for you, go bask in the green light their status page.