Service Level Agreements define the relationship between ISPs and customers. Well-designed SLAs set clear expectations, provide remediation paths when issues occur, and protect the business from unreasonable claims. Poorly designed SLAs create constant friction.
What to Include
Core SLA components include uptime guarantees, response time commitments, and credit mechanisms for failures. Uptime targets should be achievable—promising 99.99% availability when your infrastructure supports 99.9% creates inevitable disappointment.
Define measurement methodology clearly. How is uptime calculated? What constitutes an outage—complete loss of service or degraded performance? Customer perception may differ from technical definitions; clarity prevents disputes.
Exclusions Matter
SLAs must exclude factors beyond your control. Scheduled maintenance, customer equipment failures, force majeure events, and third-party outages (upstream providers, DNS, content sources) appropriately limit liability.
Document maintenance windows. Regular maintenance during low-usage hours, properly communicated, shouldn't count against availability targets. Emergency maintenance for security issues warrants separate treatment.
Credit Mechanisms
When SLAs are missed, credit policies determine compensation. Percentage discounts on monthly bills are common—perhaps 5% for missing 99.9% target, scaling up for worse performance. Cap total credits at reasonable levels to bound liability.
Proactive credits build goodwill. Automatically applying credits for known outages, rather than requiring customer claims, demonstrates customer-focused service.
Communication Standards
Response time commitments specify how quickly you'll acknowledge and begin addressing issues. Support ticket response within 2 hours is common for business services; resolution times are harder to guarantee given problem variability.
Notification commitments for planned and unplanned outages set communication expectations. Customers tolerate problems better when informed promptly than when left wondering.
Regular Reviews
SLAs should evolve with capabilities. As infrastructure improves, SLA targets can tighten, demonstrating commitment to quality. Review SLA performance quarterly and adjust terms that consistently cause friction.