Uptime & SLA
Last updated: February 16, 2026
Uptime is the percentage of time a service is operational and accessible. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a formal commitment from a hosting provider that defines the guaranteed uptime percentage, how it is measured, and what compensation (typically service credits) the customer receives if the provider fails to meet the target. SLAs are a critical factor when evaluating hosting platforms for production workloads.
How It Works
Uptime is typically expressed using a "nines" notation. An SLA of 99.9% (three nines) permits approximately 8.7 hours of downtime per year, while 99.99% (four nines) allows only about 52 minutes per year. The difference between each additional nine is significant -- moving from 99.9% to 99.99% requires a tenfold reduction in downtime.
Providers measure uptime by monitoring service availability at regular intervals, often using health check endpoints that return a success status when the application is running correctly. Downtime is usually defined as consecutive failed health checks exceeding a threshold (for example, five minutes of continuous unavailability). Scheduled maintenance windows may or may not count against the uptime calculation, depending on the SLA terms.
When a provider fails to meet their SLA commitment, customers can typically claim service credits -- a percentage discount on their next billing cycle. These credits rarely cover the full business impact of an outage, so the SLA functions more as a trust signal and accountability mechanism than as true insurance.
Why It Matters
For production AI assistants that serve customers or team members around the clock, uptime directly impacts reliability and trust. An AI coding assistant that is unavailable during a critical debugging session, or a customer-facing chatbot that goes offline during business hours, creates real costs -- lost productivity, missed interactions, and eroded confidence in the platform.
When choosing between hosting options for an AI assistant like OpenClaw, the SLA helps quantify the reliability trade-off. Managed hosting platforms typically offer formal SLAs backed by redundant infrastructure, while self-hosted setups depend entirely on your own infrastructure and monitoring. Understanding SLA terms helps you match your hosting choice to your actual availability requirements.