Re: [cobalt-users] Managing risk.

[Colin Smith <colin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 25 Apr 2000, Jeff Lasman wrote:

> Colin Smith wrote:
> 
> > All of the (Unix) systems I look after have better than 99.9% availability
> > using the above facilities without adding the complexity of clustering and
> > system redundancy. In my 15 years I've had one ethernet card fail, two
> > power supplies and several IBM disks. A far more common scenario is that
> > the system administrator 'rm -rf *'s a filesystem or removes the wrong IP
> > addresses from the DNS by mistake.
> 
> But do you guarantee it?  I never said I couldn't provide it.  I said I
> wouldn't guarantee it.
> 
> A guarantee without financial incentive is worthless.  When accounts are

No, there's no meaningful way for me to 'guarantee' availability to my
customers (other than my position). I work as a sysadmin within a large
multinational. I don't provide internet accounts or web pages to the
general public. In my case, availability is a matter of professional
pride.

> at $20/month, what should the financial incentive be?  Anthing less than
> a free month would be laughable.  A free month for every customer on the
> system that went down would be expensive (200 customers @ $20 each is
> $4,000).  And only giving it to customers who notice and call you would
> be fraudulent.

And that's the wager.

-- 
|Colin Smith:  Colin.Smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  |   Windows 2000    |
|Windows 2000 is a REALLY dumb name for an OS!!! |        AKA        |
|Linux is a MUCH better name for an OS!    :-)   |    The W2K Bug    |