Are Web hosts guilty of "Excessive charging for bandwidth and meaningless service level agreements"?

On November 2nd, Qube Networks, a UK-based Web host, issued a press release calling for a Code of Conduct for the Web hosting industry in the UK.

The press release alleges that some hosts are promising their customers high levels of service and not delivering. Two of the biggest problems according to Qube are overcharging for bandwidth and service level agreements (SLAs) that only kick in when a customer’s service is interrupted and even then the host won’t start to offer a credit for downtime until the customer has raised a trouble ticket and it is accepted.

“It is scandalous that so called managed service hosting companies are getting away with this,” Polly Arrowsmith, Qube Network’s managing director, said in the press release. “Many customers are unaware of the charges and service levels they can expect because their contracts are so misleading. Unfortunately, it is only when something goes wrong that they realise the mistake they have made.”

“The industry should be building its reputation by providing co-location and managed services of the highest standards,” she added in the same statement. “The sooner we begin to get the industry’s house in order the better and an industry Code of Conduct is the first step in that change.”

Rackspace’s marketing director and head of channel sales, Fabio Torlini, said that the company is in favour of having a body in place to regulate hosting practices but it would have be monitored by a respected third party.

However, UKFast’s managing director Lawrence Jones strongly disagrees.

“The statement to say we need to put some sort of government body in place is lunacy!” Jones said. There’s enough bureaucratic waste in this world we waste (enough) money already.”

Sales and marketing director of NetBenefit, Colin Bell on the other hand, feels the statement doesn’t apply to them since the company isn’t in the “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” space.

“For us, the typical customer, the people we aim at are those with business critical and highly complex managed hosting requirements,” Bell said. “They tend to be in situation where they’ve got no website, they’ve got no business.”

Despite Qube’s claims, it’s not something that seems to be an issue in the UK hosting industry. Bell noted that if it was, it would receive more attention from the media and customers would change hosts every couple of years.

Torlini believes that Qube’s claims are somewhat dated. While they might have had a legitimate claim three or four years ago, the hosting industry in the UK has matured and established hosts have greatly improved their SLAs. He said that customers should still be cautious and thoroughly research a host’s SLA.

“I think SLAs based purely on hardware and infrastructure are slightly old hat. I think probably sooner rather than later we’ll see the industry changing from that perspective,” Torlini said.

Another of Qube’s concerns is that Web hosts may not be paying their clients credit for downtime. While every Web host can’t guarantee 100 percent uptime, most will pay their customers a credit if the site is down for a certain amount of time.

UKFast will pay their customers a credit if they experience downtime exceeding a certain amount of time.

“From the moment we have an outage, an issue with any part of the network, we will pay, and we don’t just pay a credit, we’ll send people a cheque for the downtime that they’ve experienced,” Jones stated. “And that’s our service level agreement.”

Submitted by:
Andrew Horan, TopHosts.com