SLA

Service Level Agreement

"guarantee" of reliability from a service provider: Hosted Server, ASP, etc.

• not, of course, a zero-risk guarantee (Risk Management), and the penalty isn't enough to compensate you for lost business, it's just motivation for them to minimize failure risk

• for failures that apply only to you (e.g. Managed Hosting), the penalty isn't really that painful to the provider

• but if failure affects large number of clients, then it starts to hurt