What SLA is provided for rented servers?
Here is the breakdown of the three SLAs you receive when renting OCI Compute:
This is the standard guarantee that your virtual machine (VM) or Bare Metal server is accessible and running.
99.99% (Four Nines): This applies when you deploy your servers across two or more Availability Domains (separate data centers) within a region.
99.95%: This applies if you deploy across two or more Fault Domains within a single Availability Domain. This is the most common setup for modern, high-speed applications.
The Remedy: If downtime exceeds these limits, you are eligible for service credits ranging from 10% to 100% of your monthly bill.
This is unique to OCI. It guarantees that you will always be able to manage, monitor, and modify your servers.
The Problem it Solves: In some clouds, your server might be "up," but the dashboard is broken, meaning you can't reboot it, scale it, or shut it down during an emergency.
The Guarantee: Oracle guarantees 99.9% availability for the "Control Plane" (the APIs and Console). If you can't manage your servers when you need to, Oracle provides a financial credit.
Oracle was the first to put a legal guarantee on the speed of your rented infrastructure.
The Guarantee: Oracle guarantees that your network and storage performance will remain at 90% or more of the published specs, 99.9% of the time.
No "Noisy Neighbors": This protects you against other customers on the same physical hardware soaking up all the bandwidth or disk I/O. If your "Ultra High Performance" drive starts acting like a "Standard" drive, you can claim a credit.
| SLA Type | What it Guarantees | Monthly Target |
| Availability | Your server is running and reachable. | 99.95% - 99.99% |
| Manageability | You can start, stop, and scale your servers. | 99.9% |
| Performance | You get the IOPS and Network speed you paid for. | 99.9% (at >90% spec) |
Always Free Tier: Servers rented under the "Always Free" program (like the 4-core Ampere A1 instances) do not come with a financially backed SLA.
Preemptible Instances: If you choose to "rent" servers at a massive discount (~80% off) by allowing Oracle to reclaim them when needed, they are excluded from the Availability SLA.
Customer Error: Downtime caused by your OS configuration, application bugs, or forgotten passwords is not covered.
In 2026, OCI includes Autonomous Health Checks that proactively monitor your servers against these SLAs. If the system detects that a physical host is beginning to degrade (which would violate your Performance SLA), it can automatically Live Migrate your VM to a healthy host with zero downtime, preventing an SLA breach before it even happens.