Reliability Is a Feature
When evaluating SaaS vendors, teams spend hours comparing features, pricing, and integrations. But reliability — the vendor's ability to stay up and running when you need them — often gets a cursory glance at best.
A tool with perfect features that's down when you need it is worse than a simpler tool that's always available. Here are 10 questions to ask before signing your next SaaS contract.
The Checklist
1. Do They Have a Public Status Page?
Why it matters: A public status page signals transparency and operational maturity. Vendors who hide their reliability data may have something to hide.
What to look for:
- Is it on a dedicated domain (e.g., status.vendor.com)?
- Does it show component-level status?
- Is it powered by a reputable platform (Statuspage.io, Instatus, etc.)?
- Can you subscribe to updates via email/RSS?
Red flag: No public status page at all, or one that hasn't been updated in months.
2. What's Their Historical Uptime?
Why it matters: Past performance isn't a guarantee, but it's the best predictor we have.
What to look for:
- 90-day uptime history on their status page
- Incident history — frequency and severity of past outages
- Trend direction — are they getting more reliable or less?
Check it: Search for the vendor on ServiceAlert.ai to see their current status and monitoring history.
3. What SLA Do They Offer?
Why it matters: An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is your contractual guarantee of uptime.
What to look for:
- Specific uptime percentage (99.9%, 99.95%, 99.99%)
- How uptime is measured (monthly, annually?)
- What counts as downtime (total outage only, or degraded performance too?)
- Credit structure — what do you get if they miss their SLA?
Red flag: No SLA at all, or an SLA with so many exclusions that it's meaningless.
4. How Do They Communicate During Outages?
Why it matters: How a vendor handles outages tells you more than their uptime number.
What to look for:
- Speed of initial acknowledgment (under 15 minutes is good)
- Frequency of updates during incidents
- Quality of post-incident reports
- Multiple communication channels (status page, email, social media)
5. What's Their Infrastructure Architecture?
Why it matters: Single-region deployments are more vulnerable than multi-region or multi-cloud setups.
What to ask:
- Which cloud provider(s) do they use?
- Are they multi-region or multi-AZ?
- Do they have a disaster recovery plan?
- What's their Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)?
6. How Do They Handle Data During Outages?
Why it matters: An outage is bad; data loss during an outage is catastrophic.
What to ask:
- Are writes queued or lost during outages?
- How often is data backed up?
- Can you export your data independently?
- What happens to in-flight transactions during an outage?
7. Do They Have a Security Incident Response Plan?
Why it matters: Security incidents cause some of the longest and most damaging outages.
What to look for:
- SOC 2 Type II certification
- Published security incident response process
- Breach notification commitments (how fast will they tell you?)
- Bug bounty program
8. What Are Their Maintenance Windows?
Why it matters: Planned downtime is still downtime.
What to ask:
- Do they have scheduled maintenance windows?
- How much advance notice do they give?
- Can maintenance be done with zero downtime?
- Is maintenance during your business hours or off-hours?
9. How Dependent Are They on Other Services?
Why it matters: Your vendor's dependencies are your transitive dependencies.
What to check:
- What cloud provider do they run on? (If they're on AWS and so are you, an AWS outage hits you twice)
- Do they depend on services you also depend on directly?
- Monitor their dependencies alongside your own on ServiceAlert.ai
10. What Happens If They Shut Down?
Why it matters: SaaS vendors can be acquired, pivoted, or shut down.
What to ask:
- Is there a data export feature?
- What format is the exported data in?
- How much notice will they give before shutting down?
- Are there open-source alternatives you could migrate to?
Putting It Into Practice
Create a spreadsheet with these 10 questions for every SaaS vendor you evaluate. Score each vendor on a 1-5 scale for each question. This gives you a quantitative reliability score to complement your feature comparison.
And once you've chosen your vendors, monitor them all with ServiceAlert.ai to ensure they live up to their promises.