A Service Level Agreement, commonly known by its acronym SLA, is an understanding of service between two parties that is specific to the performance level or scope of service that will be provided. A web hosting service level agreement (SLA) will specify what guarantees or warranties the service provider shall provide the hosting account under, including an uptime guarantee. It will also outline what action can or will be taken if the service provider fails to meet the specified scope.

An SLA is a common term for web hosting in the web world. Though SLAs can get very complex, the simplest models include specifics of a monthly fee refund if an uptime guarantee is not met. This is essentially a server-level agreement with payback if the terms are not met.

How Web Hosting SLAs Work

For example, if the service level agreement states that the hosting provider will provide 99.99 percent uptime and an outage lasting longer than approximately 4.3 minutes in 30 days, the provider would refund some of the customer’s money as part of their server-level agreement.

The Details

Some SLAs measure in 24 hours or weeks, though the monthly agreement is the most common in the web hosting industry. An SLA may not just refer to server uptime/server downtime; it can often refer to technical support response time as part of a comprehensive web service level agreement. There may also be exceptions in the terms and conditions for scheduled maintenance, hardware failure, and changes made to websites or servers by the customer. Consider these a “limitation to warranty.”

Understanding a Web Hosting SLA

You must understand your hosting service level agreement and its meaning, especially regarding the WordPress hosting uptime guarantee.

Marketing Tactic or Worthwhile

Many vendors guarantee their customers an SLA to make them feel better about purchasing—it’s a marketing tool.

However, it’s typically not as simple as “if your site goes down, we give your money back.” The typical web hosting SLA compensates the customer for an amount equal to when their service was not provided (outage).

An example:

  • Host Guarantee: 99.99% Uptime (no more than 4.3 minutes of downtime in 30 days)

  • Actual Outage: 60 minutes Outside SLA: 57.3 minutes

  • Your Hosting Fee: $200/month

  • Refund provided by SLA: $0.30 (rounded up)

You can see that downtime will quickly surpass what is reasonable for your business long before the managed hosting SLA provides you any real financial satisfaction.

I often advise my clients that SLAs are certainly something you want to research and understand when you are hosting real infrastructure; otherwise, for small infrastructure or shared plans, they will not matter from a business perspective.

A Web Hosting SLA Won’t Cover Many Website Outages

Regarding hosting, an SLA will typically cover connectivity and not your specific site or application performance as part of a web service level agreement. It means that the hosting company’s connection(s) to the internet, the internal network, and the server are up and running (or at least as much as they guarantee).

Notice I said nothing about your website’s performance. Suppose your website’s performance drops and/or the site goes offline unless it is a direct result of the host’s network connectivity (not your code, not the web server, or any other reason). In that case, it is probably not covered by the SLA.

How We Deal With Web Hosting Service Level Agreements

We don’t… OK, that is not entirely true.

We Often Maintain SLAs with Our Infrastructure Providers

FatLab often maintains SLAs with many of our service providers; however, these are exclusive to our relationship with these partners and not passed on to our clients as part of their server-level agreement.

These SLAs Are Not Passed to the Client

For our hosting clients, we provide a “best-effort” guarantee. If you have an issue with your site and we can not reasonably resolve it, we will move the affected website to a new infrastructure.

A Web Hosting Server Level Agreement Does Not Make Sense for Our Clients

Looking at my example above, you can see that refund programs make little sense when considering a WordPress hosting uptime guarantee.

  • It would raise our costs to put a true SLA monitoring program in place (this would raise our prices).

  • Even if we were refunded 100% of a client’s hosting fees, our client base would still be more worried about downtime.

I think fighting over how many pennies or even dollars are owed for a little downtime is a waste of time. Instead of accounting each month for pennies owed under an SLA, we will do everything possible to provide the best infrastructure available and rectify any situation that may arise as quickly as possible.

When SLAs in Hosting Services Make Sense

Direct service level agreements make sense if you spend thousands of dollars monthly on infrastructure costs. However, for smaller deals, the financial benefit does not matter as much as the peace of mind of knowing someone will fix it and fix it as soon as possible within the terms of your web service level agreement.