Almost every internet provider will tell a business customer their connection is reliable. Far fewer will put a number next to that claim. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is what separates a marketing promise from an actual commitment — and if you run a business that depends on being online, it’s worth understanding what one actually covers before you sign anything.
What an SLA is actually promising
At its core, an SLA defines three things: how much downtime is acceptable, how fast a fault gets fixed, and what happens if the provider misses either target. A connection advertised as having “99.9% uptime” sounds impressive until you do the math — that still allows for roughly 8-9 hours of downtime a year. For a home user, that might be a mild annoyance. For a business running card payments, cloud backups, or a VoIP phone system, those same hours landing during business hours can mean real lost revenue.
Uptime percentage isn’t the only number that matters
Uptime gets all the attention, but two other figures usually matter more day to day:
- Response time — how long before a technician or support agent actually engages with your fault report, not just acknowledges a ticket exists.
- Resolution time — how long before the issue is actually fixed, which depends heavily on whether the provider has local technicians and spare equipment, or has to escalate elsewhere.
A provider can technically hit a high uptime number while still leaving a business waiting half a day for someone to show up and fix a dropped line. When you’re comparing providers, ask about response and resolution times specifically — not just the headline uptime figure.
What to ask before you sign
A handful of direct questions usually reveal how real an SLA is:
- Is the uptime guarantee in writing, or just something a salesperson said?
- What counts as “downtime” — does a slow, degraded connection count, or only a complete outage?
- What is the compensation if the SLA is missed — a bill credit, a refund, or nothing at all?
- Is support available 24/7, or only during business hours when your office might be closed but your security cameras and servers aren’t?
- Does the provider have local technicians who can actually reach your site, or does a fault get escalated to a call center elsewhere?
If a provider can’t give a straight answer to these, that itself is useful information.
Why this matters more as businesses depend more on the internet
A decade ago, a few hours of downtime mostly meant no email. Today it can mean card machines that can’t process payments, security cameras that stop recording, cloud backups that silently fail, and remote staff who simply can’t work. The more a business leans on its connection for daily operations, the more an SLA stops being fine print and starts being part of basic risk management — right alongside having a backup internet connection for when the primary line does go down.
How WebSpace Internet approaches this
We keep our commitment simple and honest: 24/7 support that’s actually answered by people who know the network, local technicians who can get to a business site quickly, and transparent pricing from Ksh 1,500/month with no hidden throttling on business packages. We’d rather a customer ask hard questions upfront than discover gaps in an SLA during an actual outage.
If you’re evaluating internet options for your business and want a straight answer on support response times and reliability, call us on 0702 447 334 or visit our contact page — we’re happy to walk through exactly what you’d be getting.