October 16, 2000

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A Safety Net For Your Web Site

Instituting the right service-level agreement can make sure vendors live up to their promises

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More on service level agreements:

More Than A Best Effort: Negotiating SLAs (10/2/00) Network Computing: ABFS Implements QoS To Make Way for Priority Traffic (10/2/00) InternetWeek: Service Level Agreements Expect Uptime (9/25/00)

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That's a challenge for many companies with large Web sites and infrastructure requirements that have grown in an organic, or unpredictable, fashion. One answer to that complex problem is to hire a third-party monitoring firm such as Siterock Inc.

That's what Commerce One Inc. did. The business-to-business E-commerce portal builder was growing so fast that its internal IT department couldn't handle the entire load of site monitoring any longer.

Sam Prather, Commerce One's senior VP of engineering, says his group manages hundreds of servers that are co-located and in managed hosting facilities. "You name it, we've got it," he says. To maintain Commerce One's systems around-the-clock, his small group of technicians were forced to sleep with beepers, which went off several times a night because of frequent false alarms. Prather says he heard about Siterock, signed a contract the next day, and, three days later, Siterock was monitoring Commerce One's network. "That weekend was the first time my technicians didn't get a call," Prather says.

Siterock doesn't have technicians on-site. Rather, it monitors the network from its Seattle-area offices using software selected by clients. Commerce One chose RAPS from Quest Software Inc. for real-time performance and capacity monitoring and some tools developed by Siterock. Prather uses Siterock's reports to manage relationships and enforce SLAs among its various hosting and network vendors, and he says the service is less expensive than using his IT staff. Commerce One also has Siterock monitoring some of the sites of suppliers of goods sold in the business portals. Commerce One also offers SLAs to its customers and uses Siterock to monitor the quality of service.

Siterock costs Commerce One about $15,000 a month, but Prather says "it has literally saved me $1 million in real costs, some big headaches, and a few very good technicians."

For companies that don't have a big IT staff, a combination of on-site operations service and remote monitoring services such as SiteSmith can help manage or upgrade SLAs. FileAmerica .com Inc. is a New York company that provides access to government services and information via the Web. Founder John Cardillo says a combination of basic Web-hosting services from Above .net Inc. and monitoring and technical services from SiteSmith provides better value than offerings from other hosting companies. "We had to tussle for about a week on the SLA," he says. "But since then, I haven't had a problem."

Except one. Cardillo says that initially he wasn't happy with the level of reporting from SiteSmith. "I think they did this because of price sensitivity," he says. But after some discussion, the reporting was upgraded. Cardillo says he pays about $15,000 a month to Above.net and SiteSmith; the total grows to $20,000 if there's a big need for technical support. The contract provides for a limited amount of technical support each month before he gets charged. But Cardillo says the technical team he gets from the vendors would cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars if he had to hire them himself.

Another way to work with separate vendors and get a single SLA is to hire a Web-services general contractor such as Nuclio Corp., which will rent and secure every piece of a Web infrastructure from the Internet to the customer application. Nuclio "owns" all of the service agreements and finds contractors certified by every product vendor.

Nuclio monitors the Web-site network and builds a Web portal that lets each customer see its SLA, CPU usage, job tickets, historical information, and more. Mike Coffield, a senior VP at Nuclio, says each SLA is built around the business needs of the customer and can take from two days to three weeks to negotiate. "We don't force-feed an SLA on a customer," he says. "We add features as they need them."

Of course, each feature in an SLA adds cost because it involves assumption of risk--and penalties--by the Web host company or outsourcing vendor. However, most equipment and other components of the network and hosting site (routers, servers, electricity, phone lines, etc.) don't usually come with guaranteed uptime. As a result, hosting companies that offer SLAs end up writing "insurance" for customers when they can get this insurance themselves.

As the hosting industry matures, SLAs will become a more common method for doing business. And, in the end, an IT manager will be able to buy an SLA that's comprehensive and covers an entire Web site and network infrastructure from end to end. However, such an agreement may quickly eat up a company's Web-site management budget. Which again raises the fundamental question: How much is your Web site worth?

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Illustration by D. Kingsley
Photograph of Sam Prather by Alan Blaustein

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