Rackspace Managed Hosting is well known for their support and their 100% network uptime guarantee. One night last week, between approximately 23:31PDT and 23:51PDT there was an outage which affected Rackspace’s authoritative DNS servers and possibly other parts of their network. As a result, any site that uses Rackspace’s nameservers may or may not have worked during that time period. As my own personal domain uses Rackspace nameservers and was not working, I inquired about the outage and received the following reply from a Rackspace account manager:

“… Our SLA provides a 5% discount off your monthly fees for every 30 minutes of network downtime you incur. Your DNS connectivity problems lasted for a total of 20 minutes, therefore not constituted under the SLA as grounds for a discount.”

I guess that means that although they have a 100% network uptime guarantee, they don’t have to do anything about it as long as the outages occur in blocks of less than 30 minutes. Something about this doesn’t sound right to me…