Every managed WordPress host promises "99.9% uptime" like it's a badge of honor. But after managing 200+ WordPress sites for over a decade, we've learned something most hosting providers don't want you to know: hosting SLAs are largely marketing theater.

That sounds cynical, so let us explain—with actual data from the fine print.

What Is a Web Hosting Service Level Agreement?

Balanced scale with contract document representing the SLA agreement between host and customer

A web hosting service level agreement (SLA) is a contractual commitment between a hosting provider and customer that specifies guaranteed uptime percentages and compensation if those guarantees aren't met. You'll also see this called a WordPress service level agreement or managed hosting SLA, depending on the provider. In theory, it's accountability. In practice? It's often a clever way to promise reliability while limiting actual liability.

A typical web hosting SLA includes:

  • Uptime percentage guarantee (usually 99.9% to 100%)
  • How downtime is calculated (and what doesn't count)
  • Credit or refund structure if guarantees aren't met
  • Exclusions that void the guarantee entirely
  • Claim procedures and deadlines

The devil, as they say, is in the details.

What Uptime Percentages Actually Mean

Server uptime gauge showing small percentage gaps that translate to hours of actual downtime

Before we dig into specific providers, let's translate those impressive-sounding percentages into reality:

Uptime Guarantee Allowed Downtime/Month Allowed Downtime/Year
99.9% 43 minutes 8 hours 45 minutes
99.95% 21 minutes 4 hours 22 minutes
99.99% 4.3 minutes 52 minutes
99.999% 26 seconds 5 minutes 15 seconds
100% 0 minutes 0 minutes

That "industry standard" 99.9% uptime allows your site to be completely offline for nearly nine hours per year—or 43 minutes in any given month—before compensation even kicks in.

For a nonprofit running a critical advocacy campaign, an association processing member renewals, or a business generating leads around the clock, that's not a guarantee. That's a liability.

WordPress Hosting SLA Comparison: The Fine Print

We reviewed the actual SLA documentation from major WordPress hosting providers. Here's what we found.

Premium Managed WordPress Hosts: SLA Comparison

Here's how the major managed hosting SLA terms compare across premium WordPress providers.

WP Engine

  • Uptime Guarantee: 99.95% standard, 99.99% Enhanced SLA (higher tiers)
  • Credit Structure: 5% of the monthly fee per full hour of downtime exceeding the guarantee
  • Maximum Credit: 100% of monthly fee
  • Claim Window: 30 days

What's Excluded: Scheduled maintenance, emergency maintenance, beta services, force majeure, and—notably—"actions or omissions of you, your Authorized Users, or any third-party acting on your behalf." That last one is broad enough to exclude almost anything.

The Math: On a $30/month plan, if your site goes down for 2 hours beyond the allowed threshold, you'd receive... $3.00. Not exactly business-interruption insurance.

Kinsta

  • Uptime Guarantee: 99.9% standard, 99.99% available on higher tiers
  • Credit Structure: Tiered—5% for 43-59 minutes, 10% for 60-119 minutes, scaling up
  • Maximum Credit: 100% of monthly subscription value
  • Claim Window: 30 days via their chat system

What's Excluded: Maintenance periods (daily 2-5 am local time), emergency maintenance, force majeure, traffic exceeding plan capacity, customer misconfigurations, and "changes to the Services by parties other than Kinsta."

Notable: Credits are calculated based on the ratio of impacted sites to total sites on your account. If you have 10 sites and one goes down, your credit is reduced proportionally.

Pressable

  • Uptime Guarantee: 100% network and infrastructure availability
  • Credit Structure: 5% per 30 minutes of downtime, up to 100% monthly fee
  • Claim Window: 30 days via email

What's Excluded: Scheduled maintenance, customer breach, customer misuse. Their 100% guarantee specifically covers "network" and "infrastructure"—not your actual website or application performance.

The Catch: That 100% sounds impressive until you realize it's network-level only. If your site crashes due to a plugin conflict, database issue, or any application-level issue, you're not covered.

Pantheon

  • Uptime Guarantee: 99.95% for Elite plans, 99.99% with Multizone Failover add-on
  • Credit Structure: 3% for 99.90-99.94%, scaling up to 50% for below 99.70%
  • Claim Window: Following month

What's Excluded: Scheduled outages, emergency maintenance, force majeure, traffic exceeding capabilities, customer breach, and "changes to the Services by parties other than Pantheon."

Notable: Pantheon's SLA only applies to Elite subscription plans. Their standard plans have no formal uptime guarantee with compensation.

Budget WordPress Hosts

Bluehost

  • Uptime Guarantee: No SLA on shared hosting plans
  • Cloud Plans: 100% network uptime with 5% credit per 30 minutes
  • Shared Hosting: "Network Server Uptime Agreement" with no compensation

The Reality: Bluehost's shared hosting—where most small businesses and nonprofits land due to low pricing—has no actual SLA. Their documentation states issues "may take more than 15 minutes to resolve" and in "rare cases, as much as a day." No compensation is offered.

This is significant because Bluehost heavily markets to beginners and budget-conscious organizations who may assume an uptime guarantee exists.

GoDaddy

  • Uptime Guarantee: 99.9%
  • Credit Structure: 5% of monthly fee
  • Determination: "As solely determined by us."
  • Credit Use: Only for purchasing more GoDaddy products

The Fine Print: GoDaddy's hosting agreement states that they alone determine whether downtime occurred. The 5% credit can only be used "for the purchase of further products and services from us." You can't get a refund—only more GoDaddy.

What's Excluded: Scheduled maintenance, custom scripting or third-party applications, outages affecting only FTP/email (not your website's appearance), causes "beyond our control," and "reliability of certain programming environments."

SiteGround

  • Uptime Guarantee: 99.9% (calculated annually)
  • Credit Structure: One month free for 99-99.9% uptime; additional month for each 1% below 99%
  • Claim Window: Not clearly specified

What's Excluded: Emergency maintenance under one hour, scheduled maintenance, and hardware failure outside their control.

Notable: SiteGround's compensation is actually more generous than most premium hosts—a full month's credit for falling below 99.9%. However, because uptime is calculated annually, your site could experience significant monthly outages without triggering compensation.

The Real Problem With Hosting SLAs

Puzzle with missing pieces representing hidden exclusions in SLA fine print

After reviewing these agreements, a pattern emerges: hosting SLAs are designed to protect the provider, not the customer.

Problem 1: The Compensation Is Meaningless

Let's do the math on a realistic scenario:

  • Your hosting cost: $100/month
  • Your site goes down: 2 hours during business hours
  • Estimated lost revenue/donations: $500-$5,000+
  • Your SLA credit: $5-$10

No organization says, "Our website was offline during our biggest fundraising push, but we got $8 back, so we're fine." The compensation doesn't come close to covering actual business losses—it's a token gesture.

Problem 2: Exclusions Void Everything

Every SLA we reviewed excludes:

  • Scheduled maintenance (even if poorly timed)
  • Emergency maintenance (open-ended definition)
  • Force majeure (increasingly broad interpretation)
  • Customer actions (easily blamed for issues)
  • Third-party services (plugins, themes, APIs)
  • Traffic spikes (your success becomes your problem)

By the time you eliminate everything excluded, very little downtime actually qualifies for compensation. Notably, none of these hosting SLAs cover website maintenance issues—plugin conflicts, database problems, or theme errors that take your site offline — are explicitly your responsibility, not theirs. This is a critical gap: your host guarantees the server stays on, but not that WordPress keeps working properly. (This is why proactive WordPress maintenance is as important as hosting quality.)

Problem 3: The Burden Is on You

Most SLAs require you to:

  • Monitor your own uptime (they won't tell you)
  • Document the outage with timestamps
  • Submit a claim within 30 days
  • Wait for their determination (which they control)
  • Accept credits instead of refunds

Meanwhile, you're dealing with the actual crisis—not paperwork.

Problem 4: Credits Don't Equal Cash

Almost universally, SLA compensation comes in the form of account credits—not refunds. You're locked into the provider who failed you, using credits toward future service from a company you may no longer trust.

GoDaddy takes this further: their credits can only purchase additional GoDaddy products. Downtime essentially becomes a forced upsell opportunity.

What Actually Matters More Than an SLA

After 13+ years managing WordPress infrastructure, we've learned that uptime isn't about guarantees—it's about prevention and response.

Proactive Monitoring Over Reactive Credits

An SLA kicks in after your site goes down. Proactive monitoring prevents downtime from happening in the first place. Look for:

  • Real-time server monitoring: CPU, memory, disk I/O tracked continuously
  • Application-level monitoring: WordPress-specific performance metrics
  • Automated alerting: Issues detected in seconds, not hours
  • Predictive intervention: Addressing problems before they cause outages

A host that catches a failing process at 2 am and fixes it before you wake up is worth more than any credit structure.

Rapid Response Over Generous Credits

When issues occur, response time matters more than compensation calculations. Consider:

  • Who responds? Tier-1 support reading scripts, or actual engineers?
  • How quickly? Minutes or hours to acknowledgment?
  • What's the resolution path? Can they actually fix infrastructure issues, or just escalate?

The difference between 15-minute resolution and 4-hour resolution can mean thousands in lost revenue or missed opportunities—far exceeding any SLA credit.

Infrastructure Quality Over Uptime Promises

Any host can promise 99.9% uptime. Delivering it requires:

  • Redundant systems: No single points of failure
  • Enterprise-grade security: DDoS protection, WAF, malware scanning
  • Automatic failover: Traffic rerouting when issues occur
  • Quality hardware: Modern servers, SSD storage, adequate resources

The SLA is the backup plan. Quality infrastructure means you rarely need it.

How FatLab Approaches Uptime Differently

Protected server with security shield and cloud infrastructure representing proactive hosting approach

We don't offer a traditional SLA with credit calculations and claim procedures. Here's why—and what we do instead.

We Focus on Prevention, Not Compensation

Our infrastructure includes 24/7 monitoring at both server and application levels. We catch issues before they become outages. When Kristin Cantwell of a major nonprofit client says they've experienced "no slowdowns, security issues, or downtime" since switching to FatLab, that's not luck—it's systematic prevention.

We Invest in Enterprise Infrastructure

Every FatLab hosting plan includes Cloudflare Enterprise (advanced WAF, DDoS protection, global CDN), Imunify360 malware scanning, and cloud hosting with auto-scaling. These are tools that other hosts charge hundreds extra for or reserve for enterprise tiers. We include them because reliable hosting requires reliable infrastructure.

We Take Responsibility, Not Refuge in Fine Print

If something goes wrong with your site and we can't reasonably resolve it, we'll move your website to new infrastructure. We don't calculate credits or debate exclusions—we fix the problem. Our stress-free WordPress migration service makes site moves painless when necessary.

As one client put it after nearly two years and 50+ websites: "100% uptime across all client websites." That's the result of infrastructure investment and proactive management, not SLA enforcement.

We're Your Technical Partner, Not Just a Vendor

The SLA model assumes an adversarial relationship: the provider promises, the customer monitors, and disputes are arbitrated. We prefer partnership. When you have an issue, you get developer-level support from people who understand WordPress infrastructure—not a ticketing system designed to minimize liability.

Questions to Ask Your Hosting Provider

If you're evaluating WordPress hosts, dig deeper than the uptime percentage:

  1. What specific infrastructure provides your uptime guarantee? (Vague answers = vague reliability)
  2. What's excluded from your SLA? (Get the full list, not the marketing summary)
  3. How is downtime monitored and calculated? (Their monitoring or yours?)
  4. What's your average response time for infrastructure issues? (Not support tickets—actual emergencies)
  5. Can you share real uptime data from existing customers? (Testimonials beat promises)
  6. What happens when my site has a problem at 2 am on Saturday? (The real test of support)

The Bottom Line on WordPress Hosting SLAs

Hosting SLAs aren't worthless—they're just not what they're marketed to be. They're a minimum floor of accountability, not a guarantee of reliability. The credit structures are designed around provider liability limits, not customer business needs.

When evaluating WordPress hosting, look beyond the uptime percentage to the infrastructure, monitoring, support, and track record behind it. A host with a genuine investment in preventing downtime will always outperform one that offers generous compensation for allowing it.

No one chooses a hosting provider hoping to collect SLA credits. You choose one, hoping you'll never need them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a web hosting SLA?

A web hosting Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contractual commitment that specifies guaranteed uptime percentages and a compensation structure if those guarantees aren't met. Most WordPress hosting SLAs guarantee 99.9% to 100% uptime and offer account credits—not refunds—when downtime exceeds the allowed threshold. However, extensive exclusions for maintenance, customer actions, and "causes beyond control" mean most real-world outages don't qualify for compensation.

What does 99.9% uptime actually mean?

A 99.9% uptime guarantee allows approximately 43 minutes of downtime per month or 8 hours and 45 minutes per year before compensation kicks in. This is considered the industry standard for shared and managed WordPress hosting. Premium tiers often offer 99.95% (21 minutes/month) or 99.99% (4.3 minutes/month), though exclusions may still prevent compensation for most outages.

Do all WordPress hosts offer uptime guarantees?

No. Notably, Bluehost does not offer an SLA with compensation for their shared hosting plans—only their cloud hosting includes an uptime guarantee. Most budget hosts either lack formal SLAs or include broad exclusions that make compensation rarely apply. Premium managed WordPress hosts typically offer documented SLAs, though the practical value varies significantly based on exclusions and credit structures.

What's typically excluded from hosting SLAs?

Most WordPress hosting SLAs exclude: scheduled maintenance windows, emergency maintenance, force majeure events, customer-caused issues (including plugin conflicts or traffic spikes), third-party service failures, and "causes beyond reasonable control." These exclusions can be interpreted broadly, meaning many real-world outages don't qualify for compensation even when your site is genuinely unavailable.

How do I claim SLA credits from my hosting provider?

Most hosting providers require you to submit a written claim within 30 days of the downtime event, typically through support chat or email. You'll generally need to document the outage with timestamps and demonstrate that it exceeded the allowed downtime threshold. The provider then determines—often at their sole discretion—whether compensation applies. Credits are almost always account credits toward future service, not cash refunds.

Is a 100% uptime guarantee real?

Some hosts like Pressable advertise 100% uptime guarantees, but these typically cover only network and infrastructure availability—not application-level issues, plugin conflicts, or database problems. Scheduled maintenance is also excluded from most "100% uptime" claims. True 100% uptime is technically impossible; the guarantee refers to specific infrastructure components rather than your actual website availability.

Do hosting SLAs cover website maintenance issues?

No. Hosting SLAs specifically cover infrastructure and network uptime—not application-level problems like plugin conflicts, theme errors, database issues, or WordPress core failures. If your site goes down because a plugin update breaks functionality or your database gets corrupted, that's explicitly excluded from compensation under virtually every hosting SLA we reviewed. This is why ongoing WordPress maintenance matters as much as hosting quality—your host keeps servers running, but someone needs to keep WordPress running properly on those servers.

Why doesn't FatLab offer a traditional SLA?

FatLab focuses on preventing downtime rather than compensating for it. Traditional SLA credits—typically 5-10% of monthly fees—don't meaningfully compensate for business losses from outages. Instead, we invest in enterprise-grade infrastructure, 24/7 proactive monitoring, and rapid response capabilities. Our approach has delivered consistent uptime, with clients reporting zero downtime across 50+ websites over nearly 2 years. We believe preventing problems serves clients better than calculating credits after they occur.

Ready to experience hosting focused on uptime prevention rather than downtime compensation? View our hosting plans or schedule a free consultation to discuss your WordPress infrastructure needs.