An uptime SLA is the clause in a service agreement that commits a provider to a minimum availability percentage over a billing period, usually a month, and states what the customer gets if the provider misses it. The remedy is typically a service credit, not cash and not compensation for your lost revenue.
Why it matters
The percentage alone tells you little until you read the definitions. What counts as downtime, how it is measured, which components are covered, and what exclusions apply (scheduled maintenance, customer misconfiguration, force majeure) decide whether the number means anything. You usually must file a claim within a set window, with your own evidence.
Example
A host promises 99.9% monthly uptime. A 30-day month has 43,200 minutes, so the allowed downtime is 43.2 minutes. If your site was unreachable for 90 minutes, you might qualify for a credit tier, but only if the SLA counts that outage and you file in time. Keep your own monitoring logs as proof.
Common mistakes
- Reading 99.9% as a guarantee. It is a target with a defined penalty.
- Ignoring exclusions such as maintenance windows, which can swallow most real outages.
- Relying on the provider's own status page as the only evidence of downtime.
- Comparing SLAs from different vendors that measure availability differently (per region, per instance, per request).
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यह पेज सामान्य जानकारी है, जिसे हमारी संपादकीय टीम ने लिखा है और दस्तावेज़ीकरण बदलने पर अपडेट किया जाता है। सर्वर और प्रदाता अलग-अलग होते हैं, इसलिए बदलाव पहले सुरक्षित तरीके से जाँचें। देखें: संपादकीय नीति और अस्वीकरण.