Last Revised
June 18, 2020
At Planhat keeping our service up running is a high priority. Downtime means unhappy customers and comes at a very high cost for us, just like it would for any other SaaS business. We’ve taken what we believe to be reasonable measures to avoid downtime, which just to give one example includes running all our app-servers in clusters and avoiding any single point of failure.
That said, improvements in level of redundancy and recovery time in a potential worst case scenario always come at a cost, both in terms of hardware/services and internal administration. Since resources are finite an increased focus on uptime implies less time for other things such as support, product development etc. This is true for the small start-ups and multi-billion dollar businesses alike.
Striking the right balance is important, and perhaps equally important is being transparent with our view on this trade-off. Customer Success Managers across our customer base depend on Planhat in their daily work, not only to get their routine work done but also for churn alerts, tasks, subscription management etc. Uptime is clearly of utmost importance. At the same time, our customers typically manage subscriptions that span a year or at least a month, in that context a few shorter periods of performance below par (though highly inconvenient, annoying, and rare) most likely wouldn’t be critical.
In practice, this policy has resulted in Planhat having over 99.9% uptime. We believe this to be a reasonable level and would take any negative deviation very seriously. We typically don't commit to any specific numbers since such a commitment only would have meaning if tied to a significant penalty, and such penalties tend to result in exaggerated robustness at the cost of product development and business value for our customers.
Exceptions from the SLA policy: The policy outlined above is what we believe makes sense for a majority of our customers. However, our infrastructure and internal set-up do allow us to commit to a specific SLA in the exceptional cases where it makes sense. If you believe an explicit SLA would make sense in your case, we'd be happy to discuss the service levels and related additional costs in more detail. Basically, tell us what levels you need along with desired penalties and we'll give you a price, full transparency promised on the calculations!
