Uptime Guarantees and SLA Explained

An uptime guarantee is one of the most important, and most misunderstood, commitments a hosting provider makes. Understanding what a specific percentage actually means in real terms helps you evaluate whether a guarantee genuinely fits your business's tolerance for downtime.

Our Current Uptime Commitment

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What an Uptime Percentage Actually Means

Uptime percentages sound similar at first glance, but small differences translate into meaningfully different amounts of actual downtime. A 99.9 percent guarantee allows for a small amount of downtime spread across a year, roughly a few hours. A 99.99 percent guarantee allows for far less, closer to under an hour across a full year. Each additional nine in the percentage represents a substantial reduction in acceptable downtime, not a small incremental improvement.

How Uptime Is Measured

Uptime is generally measured as the percentage of time infrastructure is available and functioning correctly over a defined period, commonly monthly or annually. What specifically counts as downtime, and what exceptions may apply, such as planned maintenance windows, are usually defined clearly within the specific service level agreement rather than left to interpretation.

What an SLA Actually Guarantees

A service level agreement is a formal, contractual commitment defining the specific uptime standard and often the support response times your provider commits to. Unlike a general marketing claim about reliability, an SLA gives you a measurable, contractual standard, along with a defined remedy, often service credits, if that standard is not met in a given period.

Planned Maintenance and Uptime

Scheduled maintenance windows are typically excluded from uptime calculations, since this planned, communicated downtime is treated differently from an unexpected outage. See How We Handle Planned Maintenance and Status Updates for how we communicate these windows in advance.

Enterprise Customers and Custom SLAs

Enterprise hosting customers with specific reliability requirements can often discuss SLA terms more specifically suited to their business needs, rather than relying solely on our standard published commitment. Speak with our team if your business requires a formally documented SLA with terms specific to your operations.

What Redundancy Contributes to Uptime

A high uptime commitment is only achievable through underlying infrastructure designed for redundancy. See Network Architecture: Redundancy, Peering and Global Edge for how our network is built to minimize single points of failure.