{"head":{"title":"What Is a Reasonable SLA? Uptime, Response and Credits","description":"A reasonable SLA matches the uptime and response times your business really needs and can pay for. What 99.9% means in minutes and what else to include.","canonical":"https://oceanlab.in/questions/what-is-a-reasonable-sla"},"crumbs":[{"name":"Home","path":"/"},{"name":"Questions","path":"/questions"},{"name":"What is a reasonable SLA?","path":"/questions/what-is-a-reasonable-sla"}],"question":"What is a reasonable SLA?","answer":["One that matches what the business really needs and what the system is built and paid for. Each extra nine of uptime costs more in architecture, monitoring and on-call staff, so set targets per service, and pair uptime with clear response times, maintenance windows and remedies."],"sections":[{"heading":"What uptime percentages mean","body":[["The arithmetic, for a 30-day month (43,200 minutes):"]],"bullets":[["99% allows about 7 hours 12 minutes of downtime a month."],["99.5% allows about 3 hours 36 minutes."],["99.9% allows about 43 minutes."],["99.95% allows about 22 minutes."],["99.99% allows about 4 minutes."]]},{"heading":"What else a good SLA covers","body":[],"bullets":[["How uptime is measured, from where, and what counts as down."],["Planned maintenance windows and how much notice is given."],["Support hours and response times by severity, and time to restore for critical incidents."],["Recovery targets for data loss and restore time after a disaster."],["Remedies, usually service credits, and when the client can terminate."],["Exclusions, such as outages of third-party services or issues caused by the client."]]},{"heading":"Check it against dependencies","body":[["Your SLA cannot be stronger than the services you depend on unless you build redundancy. If your hosting, database or payment provider commits to a lower figure, plan around it or do not promise more."]],"bullets":[]}],"faqs":[{"question":"What is the difference between an SLA and an SLO?","answer":"An SLA is the contractual promise with remedies. An SLO is the internal target the team aims for, usually a little stricter than the SLA."},{"question":"Do internal tools need an SLA?","answer":"Often a lighter one: support hours and response times, without credits."},{"question":"Are service credits worth much?","answer":"Usually not compared to the cost of an outage. Their real value is the incentive and the reporting that comes with them."}],"terms":[{"href":"/glossary/total-cost-of-ownership","label":"total cost of ownership"},{"href":"/glossary/technical-debt","label":"technical debt"},{"href":"/glossary/maker-checker","label":"maker-checker"}],"tools":[],"links":[{"href":"/glossary/sla","label":"SLA (service level agreement)","detail":"Glossary"},{"href":"/glossary/slo","label":"SLO (service level objective)","detail":"Glossary"},{"href":"/glossary/uptime","label":"Uptime","detail":"Glossary"},{"href":"/glossary/rto","label":"RTO (recovery time objective)","detail":"Glossary"},{"href":"/glossary/rpo","label":"RPO (recovery point objective)","detail":"Glossary"}],"related":[{"href":"/questions/what-does-software-maintenance-cost","label":"What does software maintenance cost?","detail":"Question"},{"href":"/questions/what-is-dora-for-fintech","label":"What is DORA for fintech?","detail":"Question"},{"href":"/questions/who-pays-for-hosting-after-launch","label":"Who pays for hosting after launch?","detail":"Question"},{"href":"/compare/ai-agent-vs-workflow-automation","label":"AI agent vs workflow automation","detail":"Comparison"},{"href":"/compare/rag-vs-fine-tuning","label":"RAG vs fine-tuning","detail":"Comparison"},{"href":"/glossary","label":"Glossary","detail":"Every term, in plain words."}],"sources":[],"legal":false,"updatedAt":"2026-10-25"}