Legal and compliance
What is Service level agreement?
A written commitment about the service around a system rather than the system itself: response times, resolution targets, uptime, backup frequency, and what happens when a target is missed. It is what turns "I will look at it" into an obligation.
Also called: SLA · support agreement
What a small-business SLA should specify
- Response time
- How long before someone acknowledges a report, by severity.
- Resolution target
- A realistic aim, not a guarantee, distinguished from response.
- Coverage hours
- Business hours in which timezone, and what happens outside them.
- Uptime commitment
- A percentage, with how it is measured and by whom.
- Backup frequency and retention
- Including where backups are stored and who can restore them.
- Escalation
- Who to contact when the normal route is not working.
Severity levels are the useful part
A site down and a typo on a page are not the same emergency. Defining two or three severity levels, each with its own response time, prevents both the panic and the resentment that come from treating everything identically.
Uptime percentages in real terms
99.9% permits about 43 minutes of downtime a month; 99% permits over seven hours. The difference sounds trivial and is not, which is why the number belongs in writing rather than in a conversation.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Who actually owns your website — a checklist you can verify today covers this properly — 3 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.