Every host publishes an uptime SLA — usually 99.9% or better — with a refund or service-credit promise attached if they miss it. Almost nobody actually files a claim, which is exactly why the SLA can afford to look generous on paper. We walked the claims process on several major hosts to see what actually happens when you try to collect.
What the SLA percentage actually allows
99.9% monthly uptime allows for around 43 minutes of downtime in a 30-day month before you're technically owed anything — 99.99% tightens that to about 4 minutes. The gap between those two numbers looks small on a marketing page and is enormous in practice: a host advertising 99.9% can have a bad afternoon outage, stay fully within their SLA, and owe you nothing. Read the actual percentage before assuming any downtime is compensable; a lot of downtime that feels like an outage to you never crosses the SLA's own threshold.
The claims process, step by step
- Check the status page first — most hosts require the outage to be independently confirmed (their own status page, or a monitoring tool) rather than taking your word for it.
- File within the claim window — this is the part that trips people up most: providers commonly require claims within 3–30 days of the incident, and a legitimate outage submitted late gets rejected on a technicality regardless of merit.
- Provide your own evidence — ticket ID, timestamped screenshots or monitoring logs, and the specific URLs affected. A host's o