August 11, 2008

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Dear {!firstname}:

Welcome to Your WEBSITE LAW ALERT by Chip Cooper and DigiContracts.com

Chip's Commentary:

I hope you were able to see the Opening Ceremony from Beijing Friday night. Words like "spectacular" and "stunning" are understatements.

I was fortunate enough to be a participant in the Opening Ceremony for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. I drove one of the silver-plated pickup trucks that did some simple choreography -- my only 15 minutes of fame on the international stage.

Based on what I witnessed that went into the planning and execution of the Atlanta ceremony (which was relatively simple compared to Beijing's), it's clear that the scope of Beijing's, and the level of execution -- the discipline and synchronization required -- were off the chart.

It makes you wonder... a nation which is capable of such commitment and discipline must be looking forward to being a major competitor of ours in the globalized economy in the not-so-distant future.

Web Contracting Tips:

Do you ever get involved in the negotiation of a service level agreement (SLA), where you may be required to guarantee uptime availability for your online service, or where you may require your Internet service provider to guarantee uptime availability to you?

Essentially, a SLA is part of a comprehensive services agreement where a level of service is specified in term of objective metrics, and negotiated consideration is given by the service provider for failure to achieve the metrics.

If your online business provides software as a service via a click-wrapped agreement where the user does not negotiate the terms, you probably don't get involved in negotiating a SLA.

However, if you ever negotiate a relative high-volume services transaction where you are the seller, you will probably be negotiating a SLA as part of the deal... or, if you require a high level of uptime due to the nature of your business (for example, securities trading), you may also require your service provider to provide an uptime guarantee as part of a SLA.

If you do negotiate SLAs, you're probably aware that the so-called "nines" are key terms regarding uptime availability. Often, buyers of services want "five nines"... that is, a 99.999% uptime guarantee.

"Five nines" is a relatively high guarantee, and it may be expensive to acquire. In order to put this into perspective, check out this helpful list which converts uptime "nines" into related annual downtime:

99.9999% uptime means about 30 seconds of downtime;

99.999% uptime means about 5 minutes of downtime;

99.99% uptime means about 1 hour of downtime;

99.9% uptime means about 9 hours of downtime; and

99.0% uptime means about 90 hours of downtime.

So, as you can see from the list, it's probably more meaningful to think in terms of how much "downtime" you're selling or buying, despite the fact that you may be negotiating in terms of "uptime".

For a more detailed analysis of the "nines", click here.

Comments From Digicontracts.com:

Our DigiContracts.com site provides SLAs in two agreements:

Website Hosting Agreement -- a relatively simple SLA and availability clause, and

Website SaaS Agreement -- a more sophisticated SLA with availability clause featuring a tiered approach.

Regards,

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