SLA (service level agreement)

An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is the part of the contract between a provider and its customer that defines, in numbers, the guaranteed quality of service. The most common is an availability commitment, such as 99.9% uptime ✕ Uptime is the share of time a website or server is reachable without outages, usually as a percentage. In hosting, the closer to 100%, the better. More in the glossary → per month, but it can also cover support response time or performance. Its job is to give the customer confidence: if the provider fails to meet what was promised, the SLA usually sets out compensation, such as a discount or a credit on the bill. It is common in hosting ✕ Web hosting is renting space on a server so your website is reachable around the clock. The host takes care of the technology, security, and availability. More in the glossary → , cloud ✕ "The cloud" refers to services and storage that run not on your device but on external servers on the internet. You can access them from anywhere. More in the glossary → services and business contracts. It pays to read the fine print: 99.9% sounds perfect, but it still equals several hours of downtime a year, and you should check what exactly counts as an outage.