# SLA (Service-Level Agreement)

The promised response and uptime a service contract holds the provider to.

Price and promise travel together, so a contract that pays 20% more with a four-hour response promise can be the worst account in the book once the staffing to honor it is costed. In diligence, read the SLAs against the current roster rather than against the sales copy: penalty credits, after-hours coverage, and the accounts whose promises only one employee can keep are all margin already spent. The tightest promises are usually attached to the customers everyone is proudest of.

In numbers: An SLA promising 1-hour response around the clock needs paid on-call coverage that can cost $60,000 a year, which can reprice a flagship account from the best in the book to roughly break-even.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/sla
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt