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 own status page silence doesn't help your case if they don't independently log the incident; your own third-party monitoring evidence is what actually carries the claim.
- Wait for the credit calculation — credits are typically issued as account credit toward a future bill, not cash, and calculated as a percentage of that month's hosting fee rather than any broader compensation for lost business.
What the credit is actually worth
Most SLA credits scale with how far below the guarantee you fell — a small miss (say 99.5% instead of 99.9%) might net 5–10% of that month's bill in credit, while a larger outage can reach 25–100% of the monthly fee. On a shared-hosting plan running around $10–15/month, that ceiling is a few dollars to maybe $15 in credit — nowhere near what an hour of downtime costs an active e-commerce store in lost orders. The SLA credit is a goodwill gesture and a trust signal about how a host treats its own failures, not meaningful compensation for the actual damage of downtime.
Where hosts make claims easy vs. hard
| Pattern | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Easy claim process | Self-service credit request in the account dashboard, automatic based on the provider's own monitored uptime, no manual ticket required |
| Hard claim process | Manual support ticket required, must supply your own third-party monitoring proof, narrow claim window measured in days, credit issued only after a support rep reviews and approves |
| Red flag pattern | SLA page exists but has no documented claims procedure at all — the guarantee is aspirational rather than operational |
How to actually be able to file a claim
The single biggest reason legitimate claims get rejected isn't the host being difficult — it's the customer having no independent proof. Run third-party uptime monitoring (UptimeRobot, Better Uptime, Pingdom, or similar) on every production site regardless of what the host advertises. That gives you a timestamped, third-party record of exactly when a site went down and for how long, which is the evidence hosts actually ask for and the thing most people don't have on hand when the outage happens.
FAQ
Does the host's own status page count as proof? It helps, but a host's status page can under-report incidents that didn't trip their own internal monitoring threshold — independent monitoring is the safer primary evidence.
Can I get a cash refund instead of account credit? Rarely — most SLA policies specify account credit as the sole remedy, and getting cash back typically requires escalating outside the standard SLA claims process entirely.
Is it worth filing for a short, minor outage? If it's within the claim window and you have the monitoring evidence, yes — there's little downside to filing, and a pattern of filed claims is also useful data if you're deciding whether to keep the host.
Verdict
Uptime SLAs are real but narrow: the guaranteed percentage allows more downtime than most customers assume, the credit is modest even when a claim succeeds, and the process rewards whoever shows up with their own monitoring evidence rather than relying on the host to self-report. If uptime actually matters for your site's revenue, treat third-party monitoring as mandatory infrastructure, not an optional extra — it's the only thing that reliably turns an SLA promise into an actual credit.
