[vulf]

The electric company analogy is a good one, but I don't think you're looking at it correctly.

No service, not even electricity, has 100% uptime. If thinks are that mission critical, you need a backup plan. Should you disconnect from the grid and generate your own electricity? Probably not. But should you expect that it might go out at any time? Yes. If you are not running a UPS than no one is to blame except yourself. If things are so critical that a UPS won't last long enough, then you should have a generator backup.

In contrary, what would the poster have done if his power or internet had gone down when he needed to deploy? Would he be cancelling those services? For some reason I don't believe he would.

The real key to all of this is not a question of avoiding downtime, it's learning from it and avoiding a repeat of the same incident. I think GitHub has done a great job of this, and they're very clear about what happened and what they've done to avoid it in the future. The poster, however, fails at this point. Not only does he admit he doesn't have a backup plan for deploying when GitHub is down... he flat out states that he knows what he could have done, and REFUSES to do it. Instead he's just going to cut and run, thinking he'll find another service that somehow is somehow immune to unexpected downtime. I wish I could live in that world.

[mechanical_fish]

Moreover: Nothing comes without cost. If you want a service like GitHub but with higher reliability, you are going to pay. Possibly in money, possibly in ease of use, possibly in the time it takes to identify such a service (it's really hard to gather reliable uptime data, especially in a field that is constantly evolving).

And, all things being equal, I'm not anxious to pay more money for a more reliable Github. Because it's git, people. Why pay for five nines of uptime when you can just mirror your repo? Every five minutes, if you like? With a one-line cron task? One of git's most basic functions is to make an efficient mirror of itself.

[vulf]

Indeed, GitHub's terms even state "GitHub does not warrant that ... (ii) the service will be uninterrupted..."

If uptime was a serious factor for you, you'd probably pay for an SLA to ensure uptime and compensation for downtime... and a SLA wouldn't be cheap.

[vidarh]

One of our customers wanted an SLA with more teeth. They themselves with a straight face proposed an SLA that would give them ca 8 GBP in credit against hosting fees per day of downtime. This is a multi-million pound business. We said yes, of course.

We'd happily negotiate something with real teeth, as I'm sure most service providers would, and I'm sure Github would too if a big customer pushed for it.

But you're 100% right - if we did it'd be expensive, because we'd have to turn right around and insure ourselves against the risks incurred if the amounts were remotely serious, and we'd pass that insurance cost straight on.

[sunchild]

Also, just about every SLA is pure window dressing. I know this because IAAL.