What to Negotiate in a Colocation SLA (Beyond Uptime)

Every colocation provider advertises 99.999% uptime. The difference between providers — and the difference between a good year and a very bad year — is in the clauses buyers never read.

The clauses that actually matter

1. Remote Hands response time — in minutes, not "commercially reasonable"

"Best effort" and "commercially reasonable" mean nothing at 2 AM. Ask for a written response window with a service credit attached: for example, 30 minutes to acknowledge, 2 hours to be on-site for P1.

2. Cross-connect provisioning SLA

Ten business days for a cross-connect is industry standard. Fifteen is normal. Anything longer needs a written commitment or an expedite fee schedule.

3. Power redundancy definition

A+B feeds sounds simple. Ask: are they on independent UPS strings? Independent generators? What happens on a single-UPS failure with your server pulling 60% on the surviving feed? The answers vary widely.

4. Access control — who and how fast

How long does it take to add an authorized visitor to the access list? Some facilities process in minutes; others require 24 hours notice. For 24/7 operations, this matters more than the fence height.

5. Environmental thresholds and notification

What temperature triggers a notification? What triggers a page? At what point does the facility start throttling PDU draw?

Service credits vs. real remedy

A 5% monthly credit on a $4,000 rack is $200. Your outage cost you $50,000. Service credits are theatre; the real remedy is a right-to-terminate clause tied to repeat breaches (typically three P1 breaches in a rolling 12 months).

The one clause most buyers miss

Change notification. Facilities do maintenance windows on shared power, cooling, and network infrastructure. Ask how far in advance you are notified, and whether you can veto a window that lands on your peak business hours. Without this clause, you find out about the maintenance from your monitoring at 3 AM.

Before you sign

Walk the floor. Talk to the on-shift operations team, not sales. Ask them what actually happens on a P1 — the gap between the SLA document and the operational reality is the risk you are buying.

StackTrue works with clients in every major Canadian facility. If you want a second set of eyes on a colocation agreement before you sign, we do that at no cost for prospective clients.