08. Downtime

Downtime is the opposite of uptime, but its definition (especially in a contract) is something to carefully consider. Once a contract is signed, it can be very difficult to renegotiate. Even as your products become more complex, your contracts likely stay the same.

Excused downtime is a wise thing to include in your SLA. This defines special time where you can have downtime that will not impact your SLA. Scheduling a daily, weekly or monthly recurring time period where you can perform maintenance makes meeting an SLA drastically easier.

Another good thing to include is a clause to allow for degraded performance. This allows non-essential portions of your platform to be down without counting against your SLA. If there are components of your system that are "nice to haves," consider degrading gracefully and excluding these from your SLA.