A Service Level Agreement will typically cover hardware (servers), commuincations (server broadband) and application software. We discuss here the application / site software we have written or have inherited.

If it is essential for your business to have uptime of 99.9% then an SLA is essential. It can be costly because as well as the application you will also have the hardware and the communication providers that will need individual contracts as well.

These contracts normally operate over 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year but they are very versatile. You can adapt and change to suit your business requirements and costs. The greater number of working day hours that cover is needed for the better the contract price.

You can also elect to have a mirrored server which allows your site to continue without interruption should a problem occur on server one. This is seamless as the database is also mirrored post transactions so the sites are identical copies. If the site went done before posting data then you can programme to recognise at what point the failure occurred and the worse case scenario is to ask the user to repeat the request. Mirroring systems are costly (like having 2 cars in case one breaks down) so the benefits need to outweigh the additional cost.