Service Level Agreement (SLA)

A service level agreement, or SLA, sets out defined service commitments between a provider and customer, along with measurement rules, exceptions, and possible remedies. A hosting SLA might describe availability calculations or support response targets, but the exact obligations depend on the written agreement. A cleaning business purchasing website maintenance should distinguish stated commitments from general marketing promises such as 'reliable support.' An SLA is not an uptime monitoring report, and a stated percentage does not explain how every outage will be handled. Read the definitions, exclusions, service windows, and escalation process rather than assuming that all providers use the same terms.