For what it's worth, I've tracked 14 hosts across personal and client projects since 2020. Hot take: "99.9%" SLA is marketing fiction for most budget providers once you measure from your end (not their status page). SPF/DKIM/DMARC monitoring gives me natural 1-minute heartbeat data; I log every failed MX reachability event.
My numbers:
- Contabo "99.99%": 99.71% actual (3 outages, 6 hours total, no SLA credit because "planned maintenance" wasn't announced)
- OVHcloud "99.9%": 99.83% actual (frequent micro-outages, 30-120 seconds, their status page never reflects)
- Vultr "99.95%": 99.94% actual (honest but unexciting)
- InterServer "99.9%": 99.89% actual (decent, slow support during incidents)
- Time4VPS "99.5%" (oldest, cheapest, €2/mo): 99.97% actual. No SLA. No status page. No support. Just runs.
The correlation between marketing budget and actual reliability appears negative. Discuss.