Uptime SLA Definition: What Is Uptime SLA?

Operating a business online brings with it challenges that are sometimes quite different than those found with most regular, physical stores and offices. One of the most glaring of these unique scenarios is that under certain circumstances, it can actually seem like your entire business presence disappears altogether for a certain period of time.

Obviously, a real-world store is not going to disappear and reappear, the presence is a fixed structure. The internet, however, has a degree of unreliability and vulnerability that can lead to entire sections of it becoming completely inaccessible, including the part that virtually hosts your important business presence, for extended periods of time.

As such, one of the most important services for just about any virtual business to acquire is web hosting with the best Uptime SLA you can possibly get.

Uptime SLA In a Nutshell

At its core, an SLA (Service Level Agreement) is an agreement between a service provider and customer, which defines the level of service the former will provide to the latter.

An Uptime SLA details the percentage of time your website is guaranteed to be up and available, rather than offline for any number of reasons. Without an Uptime SLA that matches your needs, your online presence could go offline in a blink of an eye making you lose customers, users and damaging your operations greatly.

Imagine having a storefront located inside of an indoor mall. If something happens to cause the mall to shut down, none of your customers can reach your store. Prospective customers and established clients alike could be lost in droves, injuring your reputation and customer base immensely. Even though the circumstances are completely out of your control, you still suffer the consequences. The same applies to your website or application when your hosting provider causes it to go offline.

Dire Consequences of Website Downtime

The severity is just as, if not more, serious when it comes to a situation involving technology.

Take the catastrophe that struck Virgin Blue Airlines back in 2012. An 11-day outage of their online booking and check-in systems impacted over 50,000 different customers, and over 400 flights. The money lost was staggering, and even caused damage to their reputation with customers. Sure, you may not operate an airline, but can you fathom just how much damage would be done if your operations were down for 11 days?

It is hard to pinpoint in exact dollars just how much your reputation is worth. This is because it is tough to identify the extent of the impact its tarnishing will have on how profitable your company is. This impact can be felt in many areas, most notably in the loss of valued customers both long and short term. Losing data is always a possibility, and may even require emergency maintenance if the outage occurs at odd hours. Many times, repair work may need to extend even after your virtual presence is restored.

It is, therefore, important to ballpark many of these costs before something like this even occurs. Sure, the figures may not be exact, but at least they give you something to start with when deciding how often you need your applications to be available. That is, what kind of uptime SLA you require.

What Most Companies Give You

With most hosting companies, their Uptime SLA is measured in a percentage usually referred to as the “Nines.” For example, some companies may offer a 99 percent Uptime SLA, which means they guarantee that your website will be accessible 99 percent of all the time you use their hosting, on average.

While such small increments between the different uptime levels may seem trivial, each level lower can translate into hours, or even days, in which your business is offline and your customers have no clue of what is happening.

As you can see in great detail at the table above, even a full 99 percent guarantee translates into seven hours over the course of a month and three days over the course of a year! Can you imagine how much damage it would do to your business if your site was offline that much?

You can calculate how much potential downtime you may face based on your current uptime SLA by using this SLA & Uptime Calculator.

The Difference With Maple-Hosting

Rather than mess around with all those pesky percentages, we make things simple for you. We offer a 100% Uptime SLA Guarantee, meaning there is no downtime whatsoever. Not only that, we give it substance with a full guarantee, without fail, each time.

If your site experiences downtime (that is caused by us), we give you an actual refund, rather than just a credit to your service account. This refund comes in the form of ONE PERCENT of your payment to us for EACH MINUTE your site is offline (up to a full refund)! Finding a better offer than that would be a mighty task indeed.

Our 100% Uptime Guarantee

While the money back is good, what is even better is the peace of mind it brings. This comes from knowing we are confident enough in our capabilities to even offer an astounding guarantee like that in the first place. As with all companies, we do seek to generate a profit. That would be exceedingly difficult if we constantly had to refund our customers for sub-par service, so the fact that we do offer it, says just how rarely our customers suffer downtime caused by an issue on our end.

A Price to Match

If you worry that an incredible offering like this comes with a hefty pricetag, we can assure you the exact opposite is the case.

The rates we offer for our hosting packages, each of which comes equipped with our 100% Guaranteed Uptime SLA for no additional cost, are some of the most competitive in the industry(when compared to hosting providers that offer a similar quality of hosting and a similar level of service). Whether you are in the market for shared hosting, VPS hosting, or your own dedicated server, our services are will within most budgets.

Your Success Is Our Success

If you are tired of losing business due to an unreliable hosting company with an insufficient Uptime SLA, we urge you to contact us today. If you are a brand new business and have no desire to ever experience this frustration and loss of business in the first place, contacting us first is an excellent way to avoid it.