99.99% uptime — 'four nines' — is the gold standard SLA for production services. It allows 52 minutes of downtime per year, 4.3 minutes per month, or about 1 minute per week. A single DDoS attack lasting 2 hours consumes your entire annual downtime budget in one incident.
DDoS and SLA Reality
- Average DDoS attack duration in 2024: 12 minutes (down from 47 in 2023, but attackers hit harder and faster).
- Multi-hour attacks targeting financial, gaming, and e-commerce sectors remain common.
- Without dedicated DDoS protection, any SLA above 99.9% is effectively unachievable.
What's Required for Four Nines with DDoS Protection
- Always-on scrubbing: attack mitigation must be active before traffic arrives, not switched on manually after detection.
- Sub-second detection: attacks not detected in under 10 seconds can cause noticeable service degradation.
- Redundant proxy infrastructure: if your scrubbing proxy has a single point of failure, you've just moved it.
- Akarguard's SLA is 99.99% — backed by financial guarantees, not marketing copy.
SLA vs Reality
Not all SLAs are equal. Check whether downtime due to DDoS attack is excluded from the SLA calculation — a common carve-out in provider agreements. Akarguard's SLA covers availability during active attack scenarios, not just normal operations.