I don't think it's so dire. I've gone through this at multiple companies and a startup that's selling B2B only needs one or two of these big outages and then enterprises start demanding SLA guarantees in their contracts. it's a self correcting problem
My experience is that SLA "guarantees" don't actually guarantee anything.
Your provider might be really generous and rebate a whole month's fees if they have a really, really, really bad month (perhaps they achieved less than 95% uptime, which is a day and half of downtime). It might not even be that much.
How many of them will cover you for the business you lost and/or the reputational damage incurred while their service was down?
It depends entirely on how the SLAs are written. We have some that are garbage, and that's fine, because they really aren't essential services, SLAs are mainly a box-checking exercise. But where it counts, our SLAs have teeth. We have to, because we're offering SLAs with teeth to some of our customers.
But that's not something you get "off the shelf", our lawyers negotiate that. You also don't spend that much effort on small contracts, so there's a floor with most vendors for even considering it.
