In layman’s language, an SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a contract/agreement between the web hosting provider and the user that specifies the levels of service that is expected to be fulfilled and delivered during the stated term of service. The contract/agreement can be a general document or extremely detailed.
An ideal SLA contains the below-mentioned three service areas:
- Server Availability: The web hosting service provider usually guarantees a minimum of 99.0% uptime. Although all service provider tries to achieve the goal of 100 % availability, however, this goal is not realistic, and generally, uptime of 99.5%-99.9% is provided by the most of the web hosting providers which is more realistic.
- Server Administration: This area includes the management of the server and other service areas related to server administration responsibilities like acceptable response for the issue resolving, server monitoring and audits.
- Data security and backup: The details of the percentage and frequency of schedules data backups will be mentioned along with the disaster recovery plan, it’s testing, and the issue escalation metrics.
An ideal SLA should also cover, the technical support extended and the mention of server facility and billing details of the product and services offered.
Basic functions of SLA
According to most of the web hosting service providers and experts, most of the SLAs have these below-mentioned functions
- To serve as a basis for discussing available service and their relative costs, planned responses to emergencies, and how unexpected problems or issues will be handled and resolved.
- As a reference for determining if a vendor has met its promises and if not what are the due penalties.
Some important factors to consider when looking for your Web hosting provider’s SLA
- Money back guarantees in case of any failure.
- Guaranteed uptime- how it is calculated and refunds for downtime.
- Provisions of refund/downtime credits.
- Bandwidth and disk space usage.
- Miscellaneous – servers resources, technical support, escalations, facility and provisions.
Understanding the Service level agreement provided by your web hosting provider is very important, you should learn and understand the provisions stated and the various service levels offered by your web hosting provider.
