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.
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. 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 — 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.
When there is nothing to read
Two entries in our catalog have no published SLA at all: BuyVM (we checked their terms on 2026-08-22) and Hetzner's dedicated Robot line — Hetzner publishes an SLA for its cloud product, but the dedicated line falls outside it. Absence of an SLA does not mean a provider will be down constantly; BuyVM runs stable Ryzen slices on famously unmetered bandwidth, and Hetzner's dedicated boxes are workhorses. What absence means is that if uptime matters to your workload, the risk contract is entirely yours: no credits, no defined measurement, no recourse beyond canceling. For a hobby project that may be a fine trade for the price. For anything with a pager, it is information you want before checkout, not after.
Credits, not refunds
Almost every commitment on the board above pays out in service credits, not cash. If your Hetzner cloud server misses 99.9%, you get a percentage off a future bill, capped by their schedule — you do not get your money back, and you certainly do not get compensation for your lost revenue, your missed orders, or your customers' patience. DigitalOcean's per-Droplet SLA is one of the more concrete ones because it attaches to individual instances rather than averaging across a fleet, which matters: fleet-wide percentages can hide a single unlucky server behind nine healthy ones.
- 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.
- Check the exclusions: scheduled maintenance, your own configuration, and 'limited availability' services are routinely outside the number.
- Check the remedy: credit schedules usually cap out well below your actual monthly cost, and require you to open a ticket within a claim window.
- 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.
If you want to compare these providers on price and features alongside their commitments, our VPS comparison tool carries all twelve with the same captured data this article is built from — including a dedicated-SLA column so the fine print is a first-class filter, not a footnote. And if a provider you care about is missing a published commitment, treat that as data too: the honest answer to "what happens if you go down?" should be written somewhere before you pay, not after.