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There was a major outage today (Nov 26, 2012) at Server4You's Strassburg data center. My vserver was down for 8 solid hours. I've read their related terms and conditions and they provide the service as-is, ie no guarantee at all. That means I get what I get, no place for complaint.

However I'd be curious what is the proper behavior in this case? Is this outage acceptable because of the low price? Would you consider doing any action? (eg. switching to another provider)

They've sent this after 3-4 hours of outage:

Dear customer,

Around 6:00 AM CET (UTC/GMT +1 hour) this morning, November 26, we experienced an outage due to a failure of the power supply of our cooling system. There was an increase in operating temperature in some parts of our Strasbourg data center, why some vSERVER host systems needed to be be shut down for security reasons.

The issue has been resolved already and the cooling unit is fully operational again, our data center engineers are now working on each hostsystem in order to bring it back online as soon as possible. The first systems are available again, the operation might still be ongoing until the early afternoon.

We appreciate your patience and understanding of this situation and deeply apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Best Regards vServer-Support

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    You get what you pay for!
    – Zapto
    Nov 26, 2012 at 14:26
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    If you're dissatisfied with the quality of your provider's outage, you could always switch to Amazon. They have much longer outages that impact millions of people. Nov 26, 2012 at 14:31
  • Ok, so neither amazon's cloud services are better :) I'm sorry to see that my question was low quality. I was searching for similar past issues to see real 'case studies'. Nov 26, 2012 at 14:44
  • @AttilaFulop Don't worry too much about that. It's just not the kind of question stack exchange wants/is good at. At the moment, though, if you want an SLA better than you've got, you'll be paying an arm and a leg for it. Or you can get a cheap plan through whoever, and live with the occasional outage. So yeah, it's a common issue. Nov 26, 2012 at 14:50
  • @HopelessN00b thank you, that was the answer I was looking for! I learn to live with it and/or look for redundancy. Nov 26, 2012 at 14:54

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You've always got the option to take your business elsewhere, of course, but standards of services are typically defined by a "Service Level Agreement" that outlines what the expected levels of service are. In this case the SLA is "best effort".

edit I should have said in my original answer - any SLA that imposes any kind of real penalty on the provider (even if the penalty is just a refund of the money you paid for service during the time the service wasn't available) tends to be expensive.

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  • I might also add to this that the provider (Server4You) has no SLA, so they can pretty much do what they want with your server and you cannot do anything about it.
    – AStopher
    Jan 4, 2015 at 9:49
  • I'm not sure why you're commenting on a two-year old answer @cybermonkey but if you're the customer of a poor provider then they can't do "anything they want" with your server, they can only do whatever you allow them to do because you're the customer and you're continuing to pay them to deliver poor service. You can indeed do something about that: Take your business elsewhere.
    – Rob Moir
    Jan 4, 2015 at 9:52
  • I was simply trying to find their SLA because they guarantee to deliver your server within 24 hours and they haven't done this (ordered two days ago). Ordered another server with another provider and sent them a cancellation request. It's a shame because apparently they're pretty decent once your server is up and running.
    – AStopher
    Jan 4, 2015 at 9:58
  • See this screenshot: puu.sh/e3kmt/4b728db5ac.jpg
    – AStopher
    Jan 4, 2015 at 10:03

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