It's important to drill down to the specifics of the various areas you are comparing. It's one thing for a provider to say he can back up your files everyday. But you want the provider to tell you he can recover a file of a certain size in four hours. Determine in writing the penalties for downtime beyond a certain agreed-upon monthly limit. If reliability is essential to your operation, consider providing the hoster with bonuses for outstanding Web site performance, says Jakubowski.
Carrots can help.
Don't become enamored over claims of 99.99 percent availability without peaking under the hood. It's important to determine how the hoster's availability claims are calculated. In most cases, SLAs are only valid with respect to unscheduled downtime. Managers should also ask how large a customer sample was involved in determining the hoster's uptime claims. If it's only a handful of firms, be wary.