Hey WotC, SHOW ME THE SLA!!!

[wedgeski]

You won't get a SLA, you'll get a Terms of Use, and they will say the following:

'Wizards does not guarantee the availability of services based on the DI subscription but will endeavour to reduce downtime as much as possible."

This will be completely in line with other service providers.

 

[XCorvis]

/.-ed

Yep, that's good enough for me, explains everything. ;-) Seriously, I'm wondering, does anyone know what the stats are on the percentage of sites that DON'T go down when that happens? Can't be too high, that's for sure!

If your site is database driven, and you get /.ed or dugg or wanged, you need to have a god-like admin to keep your system up and running, and probably it will require drastic measures.

Since the rest of wizards.com is still up, I can only assume that they had to kill the D&D site to keep the others working. Thankfully we're still up and running here, which is frankly the best place to get D&D news anyway.

The Official forums are still up, by the way.
http://forums.gleemax.com/forumdisplay.php?f=686

 

[Xyxox]

/.-ed

Yep, that's good enough for me, explains everything. ;-) Seriously, I'm wondering, does anyone know what the stats are on the percentage of sites that DON'T go down when that happens? Can't be too high, that's for sure!

Whenever I've been called upon to insure our site doesn't go down during a big marketing push, I've always been able to insure the uptime.

But that's not the issue I'm presenting here. It's a symptom of something bigger. A subscription based web initiative requires SLAs. Yeah, there isn't an SLA for the marketing portion of a web offering and that's fine. I don't expect high up times for the base wizards site. When I start paying a fee for content delivery and storage, I expect an SLA to be adhered to and the provider will pay penalties in the form of credits when it does not maintian the level of uptime guaranteed in the SLA.

The jump from marketing content site to hosted services is a major one, and one I hope WotC has thought about. The difference is between a cost center (marketing based web site) to a revenue center (subscription based hosted services). Expectations for guaranteed up time increase accordingly in the altered content delivery model and requires many different aspects be thought out completely. Does WotC have a disaster recovery plan for the hosted services? What happens when a tornado takes out the datacenter housing the servers? What happens if the hard drives crash and they cannot recover my data that I am paying them to host? What penalties does WotC pay when they have an unexpected outage?

My cable provider credits my account whenever there is an outage. In my job, we host services for other companies and if we go down, we pay penalties for the down time.

WotC had better think this one through because they are entering an arena they apparently have little subject matter expertise within. This is not the same thing as Blizzar's WoW servers. This is entirely different and there are industry standards for what WotC proposes doing with the D&D Insider site.

 

[SavageRobby]

/.-ed

Yep, that's good enough for me, explains everything. ;-) Seriously, I'm wondering, does anyone know what the stats are on the percentage of sites that DON'T go down when that happens? Can't be too high, that's for sure!

That totally depends on your level of technical expertise, how much planning time you had, and what your server (both hardware and software) architecture looks like. Some setups are relatively easy to scale - alert your hosting company (most do burstable bandwidth), slave a few reader databases, clone some web servers, throw a load balancer in and your good to go. Some are poorly designed for scalability, and incrementally adding capability takes an act of Congress (and even then, is about as effective). After the many and various civil disasters/bombings/terrorist acts, a number of the news sites, even after recording record traffic, manage to stay up (even if just barely) - all the while serving far more video than usual.

Given that they claim this has been in the works since 2005, that Gencon has been a known date for quite awhile, and that these are the technological whizzes that couldn't manage to keep the search function working on their forums for something like 2 years I'm guessing is has to do more with poor ability to scale than anything else. What is interesting from a technological perspective is that only the D&D portions of the site (and just the content portions, not the forums) are down. The Magic, Star Wars and Dreamblade portions are all up.

 

[Xyxox]

If your site is database driven, and you get /.ed or dugg or wanged, you need to have a god-like admin to keep your system up and running, and probably it will require drastic measures.

Since the rest of wizards.com is still up, I can only assume that they had to kill the D&D site to keep the others working. Thankfully we're still up and running here, which is frankly the best place to get D&D news anyway.

The Official forums are still up, by the way.
http://forums.gleemax.com/forumdisplay.php?f=686

A subscription based site should not be /.ed, and that's my point in asking WotC to present the SLAs for D&D Insider.

A marketing web site is one thing and will get /.ed occasionally if the marketing people are doing their jobs right.

Tehre are different expectations automatically for a subscription based hosted service, which is what D&D Insider will be.

 

[Umbran]

*nod*. Rare indeed is the site that can resist the might of the slashdot.

Consumer end-users rarely get SLAs. Service Level Agreements are more typically agreements between departments or companies with big contracts. And even with such an agreement, you never get the promise of 100% uptime. At least, you get no such promise from anyone competent. because they never know when something will get slashdotted, or a power supply hit by lightning, or bearings go bad on one too many disk drives at once....

 

[Xyxox]

You won't get a SLA, you'll get a Terms of Use, and they will say the following:

'Wizards does not guarantee the availability of services based on the DI subscription but will endeavour to reduce downtime as much as possible."

This will be completely in line with other service providers.

Not any hosted content service provider I will do business with. This isn't WoW, this is a hosted content service and as such, expectations are higher than a WoW model.

 

[TheYeti1775]

You won't get a SLA, you'll get a Terms of Use, and they will say the following:

'Wizards does not guarantee the availability of services based on the DI subscription but will endeavour to reduce downtime as much as possible."

This will be completely in line with other service providers.

Yup and it will look like this:

Taken from WOTC thread: http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?p=13446056#post13446056

Originally Posted by Wizards.com & Gleemax.com Website Terms of Use - Last Updated: August 16, 2007
Wizards of the Coast, Inc. (“Wizards”) welcomes you. These Website Terms of Use (“TOU”) apply to your use of this website (the “Site”). These TOU apply to each visitor to and user of the Site (each, a "User"), including you and any other unregistered users, registered users and paying subscribers (each such registered user or paying subscriber, a "Member"). By visiting or using the Site you agree to the terms and conditions of these TOU. The purchase or use of products and services (such as blog or profile page features) available to Members through the Site may also be subject to certain additional terms and conditions provided with those products or services.

 

[Xyxox]

Bottom line for me is, if there is no SLA, I won't be doing business with them for online content delivery. I can get SLA-fre content hosting services for free throughout the web, I won't pay for content hosting services without an SLA. that's the whole purpose of paying for the service, you get a guarantee.

 

[SavageRobby]

Not any hosted content service provider I will do business with. This isn't WoW, this is a hosted content service and as such, expectations are higher than a WoW model.

My professional experience has been more like Umbran's. Consumer-based online content/functionality distributors rarely get the same kind of treatment that corporate-based ones do, simply as a matter of economics. The per customer leverage is much different when you have 100,000 customers paying $10 each, rather than 10 customers paying $100,000 each.