Clarity in Marketing Materials

Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: The Importance of Clarity & Accuracy of Marketing Material

“100% Uptime Guarantee.” Anyone who has ever hosted a server, worked at a collocation facility or even used an Internet connection knows that the ‘100% Uptime Guarantee’ is nothing but a marketing slogan. For most companies doing business on the Internet, it is not a service level they are getting from their providers. It may be a technically noble goal to aspire to, but guaranteeing it is a dangerous practice. So why do so many collocation facilities claim it? If you look at collocation facilities as an industry and compare it to other industries, the answer will become a little more clear.

Let’s compare industries. In construction, no contractor will guarantee that their building will remain erect. What if a 9.8 earthquake hits? What if there is flooding and the foundation becomes shaky, what if… that’s why you have insurance. With data hosting, you are also dealing with infrastructure: Physical buildings, fiber optic cable, servers, switches and routers.  Any one of these components could stop functioning or be damaged at any moment, rendering the ‘100% Uptime Guarantee’ unsustainable. Of course, some of these factors can be mitigated by geographically diversifying the suppliers, connections, and locations where equipment is hosted – but the system is still not 100%. So how is it that an industry such as construction, with such a long history is unable to make such a claim, but the telecommunications industry – a relative new comer – is comfortable making the 100% uptime claim?

In reality, most data hotels and hosting solutions (even the Tier 1 providers) can not make such claims for most of their customers. The costs are simply too great. For certain mission critical applications sufficient redundancies exist so that an uptime nearing 100% can be achieved, but that does not apply to most co-location centers.

Vancouver Colocation has a different strategy when communicating its uptime capability with its clients.  Instead of a relatively meaningless guarantee, we provide information on our equipment, infrastructure and disaster recovery procedures. Cumulatively, that information provides you with an accurate assessment of not only how likely it is that you will experience outages, but what processes are in place to minimize any potential outages.

As an example, we don’t wait for our backup equipment to be needed before testing their reliability. They undergo quarterly checks and annual parts replacements (where applicable). This kind of due diligence increases the likelihood that all systems continue functioning without interruption in the event of a large scale 3^rd party outage.

Contact us at 604-473-9700 for a full review and outline of our network infrastructure including our business continuity and emergency procedures plan. We’ll give you just the technical facts without a sales pitch!