We read the SLA fine print of 12 VPS providers so you don't have to
Every hosting marketing page has a number on it. Very few contracts do. An SLA — service level agreement — is the only part of a provider's uptime story that is legally theirs, and the gap between the two can be enormous. We went through the published SLAs for all twelve providers in our VPS comparison: eight cloud providers and four dedicated lines, from Hetzner to Contabo to Akamai's Linode. Some of what we found surprised us: one major budget provider guarantees just 95%, two publish no SLA at all, and the industry's standard remedy for broken uptime is a credit on your next bill — rarely cash back. This article is the annotated reading, with math, edge cases, and the capture notes so you can verify every claim without opening twelve legal PDFs yourself.
The full board
| Provider | Published commitment | What it actually means |
|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean | 99.99% / month | Per-Droplet instance SLA — among the strongest commitments in the group |
| Linode (Akamai) | 99.99% / month GA services | Applies to generally-available services; limited-availability services get 99% |
| Vultr | 100% host-node + network | Downtime credits when your host node or network fails — but "100%" covers those components, not everything |
| OVHcloud Advance (dedicated) | 99.95% / month | Advance bare-metal range; credit-based |
| Hetzner Cloud | 99.9% / month | Per cloud server, credit-based |
| Hostinger VPS | 99.9% / month | Service uptime guarantee per their legal agreement |
| OVHcloud Public Cloud | 99.9% | Public Cloud services, credit-based |
| InterServer | 99.9% VPS uptime | Guarantee on the VPS line |
| netcup | ≥ 99.9% annual average | Guaranteed average annual minimum availability — measured over a year, not per month |
| Contabo | 95% in T&C | See below — this one deserves its own section |
| BuyVM | None published | No SLA found in their terms (checked 2026-08-22) |
| Hetzner Dedicated (Robot) | None published | SLA applies to the cloud line only; the dedicated Robot line carries no published uptime guarantee |
The 95% outlier
Contabo's terms and conditions guarantee 95% availability. That is not a typo and it is not our paraphrase — it is their own knowledge base wording, captured into our catalog with a dated provenance note on 2026-08-22 and sourced to their public T&C. To appreciate the difference: 95% monthly availability allows about 36 hours of downtime in a 30-day month. A 99.9% commitment allows roughly 43 minutes. A 99.99% commitment allows about four minutes. Contabo remains genuinely popular because the hardware-per-euro ratio is aggressive — their smallest catalog plan is 4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM / 32 TB bandwidth at €4.99/month (listed as EUR 4.40 in the catalog's net-of-VAT capture, displayed as €4.99 incl. VAT on their storefront, verified via contabo.com/vps-hosting) — but an SLA is the part of the deal that says what happens when things break, and this one says: quite a lot of breakage is within contract. If you run background workers that retry, 95% can be a fine economic trade. If you run a checkout or a game lobby, that 36-hour contractual window is the number to carry into your incident math.
When there is nothing to read
Credits, not refunds
- Check the measurement window: monthly percentages let one bad weekend eat the whole allowance; annual averages (netcup's ≥99.9%) smooth spikes over a year but let a single bad month hide inside twelve good ones.
- Check the exclusions: scheduled maintenance, your own configuration, upstream DDoS mitigation, and 'limited availability' services are routinely outside the number — Linode's 99% vs 99.99% split is exactly this.
- Check the remedy: credit schedules usually cap out well below your actual monthly cost, require you to open a ticket within a claim window (often 30 days), and pay only in future service.
- Check the scope: per-instance (DigitalOcean's Droplet SLA) beats per-platform averages; component-scoped 100% (Vultr's host-node + network) is excellent for those parts and silent about the rest.
Who actually bears this risk?
We get asked whether a thin SLA means a provider is bad. It does not. It means the risk allocation is explicit and sits with you. If you run a side project, a staging box, or a batch renderer that retries, Contabo's 95% at €4.99 is an outstanding economic trade — you are buying raw compute per euro and self-insuring uptime with architecture (restarts, multi-node, backups) rather than with a contract. If you run a checkout, an API that external customers poll, or a multiplayer lobby with a live population, you are buying contractual uptime first and raw compute second, so a 99.99% per-Droplet promise with defined credits belongs near the top of your filter, even if it costs more per vCPU. The same portfolio thinking applies across tools: a European founder who values sovereignty might accept Hetzner or Contabo's EUR pricing (normalized in our rankings at the fixed 1.08 EUR/USD hint from `fx.ts`, as-of 2026-08-20) and offset the weaker SLA with a cheaper hot standby elsewhere, while a team shipping to a global audience might pay Vultr or Linode's premium for denser regions and clearer per-node remedies. Compare the trade live in our VPS comparison or see how we handle promo markup in the domain TCO tool.
How we captured and verified it
Every row above comes from `vps-catalog.json` verifiedAt 2026-08-22 — twelve providers (eight shared cloud, four dedicated) with live-verified pricing from vendor pricing sheets and GPU plans verified against public APIs (DigitalOcean's pricing page HTML, Linode and Vultr's public plan APIs — sweep 2026-08-22, stale Hetzner/OVHcloud/Contabo GPU rows removed). EUR rows (Hetzner, Contabo, OVHcloud, netcup, Hetzner Robot/OVH Advance) carry `currency: EUR` and are ranking-normalized via the shared `fx.ts` hint at EUR→USD 1.08 (FX_AS_OF 2026-08-20) so comparisons are unit-consistent while native prices stay displayed. The `slaUptime` field itself was captured 2026-08-22 from each vendor's own legal/SLA surface: docs.hetzner.com, digitalocean.com/sla/cpu-droplets, vultr.com/sla, akamai.com/legal/sla-compute, hostinger.com/legal/hosting-agreement, contabo knowledge base via contabo.com/blog, netcup product page, buyvm.net ToS, OVH contract PDF, and interserver.net/vps. Where no commitment exists, the catalog says "None published" with the check date rather than inventing coverage. If any vendor updates its terms, the next recapture flips the value and this article gets revised rather than defended — refreshability is a core property of our editorial factory, documented in the strategy docs and visible in the updatedAt at the top of this page.