SLA Scorecard: How to Compare Hosting Providers by Real‑World Outage Performance

Cut procurement time and vendor risk: compare hosting and CDN providers by their real‑world outage performance

When procurement teams and small business operators choose a hosting or CDN vendor, public SLAs often read well on paper—but real outages tell a different story. If you're juggling multi‑vendor integrations and trying to quantify operational risk for stakeholders, this article gives you a practical, vendor‑ready SLA scorecard and a repeatable methodology to compare providers by outage history and SLA behaviour in 2026.

What you'll get (quick)

• A tested set of metrics to capture outage performance and SLA responsiveness.
• A scoring formula with weights and penalties you can apply immediately.
• An example, step‑by‑step scorecard for Cloudflare, AWS and common CDN vendors (illustrative data).
• Actionable procurement rules and negotiation levers to convert scores into contract terms.

Why outage history and SLA behaviour matter more in 2026

Late 2025 and early 2026 saw recurring high‑profile disruptions that affected multiple major platforms and CDNs simultaneously. Public incidents—like the January 16, 2026 outages tied to Cloudflare that cascaded to large sites including X—demonstrated two persistent truths: operational incidents still happen at scale, and SLA credits rarely compensate for reputational or revenue loss. For commercial buyers, that means you must evaluate vendors not just by promise but by their historical delivery and incident handling.

Industry trends that increase the importance of this analysis:

• Edge and multi‑cloud complexity: More distributed architectures mean outages can be partial, regional, or invisible to superficial checks — read how edge registries and cloud filing are changing assumptions about distribution and trust.
• Regulatory operational resilience: Auditors and insurers increasingly demand demonstrated outage metrics and response playbooks — see public guidance such as the Public-Sector Incident Response Playbook for major cloud provider outages.
• Improved observability tools: Advanced synthetic monitoring and global telemetry let buyers triangulate provider claims with independent data; techniques from observability in serverless analytics translate well to CDN and edge measurement.
• Shift to SLOs and SRE contract clauses: Buyers negotiate SLO‑based credits and runbooks rather than crude uptime percentages alone — standards and verification roadmaps such as the Interoperable Verification Layer are shaping contractual expectations.

Core metrics for an SLA Scorecard (what to measure)

Design your scorecard around metrics that reflect business impact and operational reliability. Below are the core fields you should capture for each vendor.

1. Uptime (observed) — Percentage uptime measured by independent probes over the last 12 months. Prefer global synthetics and local probes from your key regions.
2. Incident frequency — Number of incidents impacting production (P1/P2) in last 12 months.
3. Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) — Median time to restore service for P1/P2 incidents.
4. Severity distribution — Share of incidents that were P1 (full outage) vs P2/P3 (partial degradation).
5. Geographic impact score — Number of regions affected per incident normalized to your footprint.
6. SLA credit adequacy — Practical value of the SLA credit as % of monthly spend and time to claim.
7. Transparency & communication — Quality of status pages, frequency of updates, and RCA quality (scored by past incident RCAs).
8. Third‑party dependency risk — Dependencies such as DNS providers or critical partners and their historical outage coupling.
9. Contract & compliance — SLA termination rights, liability caps, and regulatory attestations (SOC2, ISO27001, etc.).

Where to get reliable outage data

Trust but verify. Combine provider disclosures with third‑party telemetry and your own monitoring. Use multiple sources to avoid blind spots.

• Provider status pages — Good for timelines and RCAs, but treat them as one input. If you need a playbook for consolidating status and tooling, see how to audit and consolidate your tool stack.
• Commercial observability platforms — ThousandEyes, Catchpoint, Datadog Synthetics, and others provide independent global probes; apply lessons from embedded observability projects to synth checks.
• Public incident aggregators — DownDetector, community forums, and press reports (e.g., Jan 2026 coverage of Cloudflare and AWS disruptions).
• Your synthetic checks — Create region‑specific probes for your critical flows (login, checkout, API endpoints).
• Network traces and logs — When evaluating existing vendors, request anonymized incident logs to verify timelines and root causes.

Scoring methodology: how to turn metrics into a single vendor score

Here is a practical, repeatable scoring approach you can implement in a spreadsheet. It balances recency, severity, and business impact.

Step 1 — Normalize each metric to a 0–100 scale

For example:

• Uptime: 99.999% = 100, 99.9% = 80, 99% = 40 (use log or piecewise scale to differentiate five‑nines).
• Incident frequency: 0 incidents = 100, 1–2 = 80, 3–5 = 50, >5 = 20.
• MTTR: < 15 min = 100, 15–60 min = 80, 1–4 hrs = 50, >4 hrs = 20.

Step 2 — Weight metrics by buyer priorities

A recommended default weighting (adjust by business priority):

• Uptime (observed): 25%
• Incident frequency: 20%
• MTTR: 20%
• Severity distribution: 10%
• Geographic impact: 8%
• SLA credit adequacy: 7%
• Transparency & communication: 5%
• Third‑party dependency: 5%

Step 3 — Add penalties for systemic risks

Apply negative modifiers where appropriate:

• Single root cause coupling: −10 to −30 points if multiple customers were affected by the vendor's external dependency (e.g., a DNS or core CDN component failure). Investigate coupling documented in industry writeups and public sector incident playbooks.
• Missing RCA within SLA timeframes: −5 to −15 points if no full RCA is published within your required timeframe.
• Slow credit processing: −5 to −20 points if SLA credits historically took months or litigations were needed.

Step 4 — Calculate the final score

Final Score = Sum(normalized_metric × weight) + Sum(penalties)

Recency and decay: weight recent incidents more

Operational improvements matter, so your score should reflect recency. Apply a decay model: weight the last 12 months at 60%, 12–36 months at 30%, and older history at 10%. This penalizes old issues less and rewards recent stability.

Illustrative sample scorecard (hypothetical)

The table below uses illustrative data to show how the math works. These are examples only—run your own probes and audits before making decisions.

• Vendor A (Cloudflare‑style): Observed uptime 99.997 (normalized 95), incidents 4 (normalized 50), MTTR 45 min (normalized 80), SLA credit adequacy 5% of monthly spend (normalized 60), transparency 90 → Weighted score ≈ 74.
• Vendor B (AWS‑style): Observed uptime 99.995 (normalized 92), incidents 3 (normalized 65), MTTR 90 min (normalized 50), SLA credit 10% (normalized 75), transparency 70 → Weighted score ≈ 71.
• Vendor C (regional CDN): Observed uptime 99.9 (normalized 80), incidents 7 (normalized 20), MTTR 3 hrs (normalized 50), SLA credit 20% (normalized 85), transparency 60 → Weighted score ≈ 55.

Interpretation: Even with similar uptime percentages, differences in incident frequency, MTTR, and transparency produce materially different risk profiles. A higher SLA credit does not offset frequent P1 incidents or poor communication.

"Uptime numbers are a starting point. Frequency, impact, and the vendor's response behaviour determine real operational risk."

How to use the scorecard in procurement

Translate scores into concrete procurement rules to speed decision‑making and strengthen negotiation leverage.

• Score threshold for shortlist: Require a baseline score (for example, ≥70) to qualify for enterprise procurement.
• Contract triggers: For vendors scoring 60–70, require stronger runbook commitments, quarterly business reviews, and defined credit automation.
• High‑risk vendor controls: For scores <60, insist on multi‑region active‑active deployment or multi‑CDN architecture and stricter termination rights — consider architecture patterns discussed in edge registry thinking when selecting complementary CDNs.
• Insurance and indemnity: Use score results to negotiate liability caps and breach definitions tied to P1 incident performance.

Advanced strategies: beyond single vendor scoring

Scoring should inform architecture and operational controls, not only vendor selection.

1. Multi‑CDN and active failover: Use scorecard results to select complementary CDNs—pick providers with uncorrelated incident histories.
2. SLO‑backed contracts: Convert high‑priority SLOs from your scorecard into contractual obligations with automated credits and defined RCAs. See how reconciliation of SLAs across platforms can be performed in From Outage to SLA.
3. Chaos engineering: Validate your topology against actual failure modes observed in vendor RCAs to reduce blast radius.
4. Vendor score monitoring: Run the scorecard quarterly and link it to procurement dashboards to detect trend regressions early — this ties back to vendor tooling and stack consolidation strategies in tool stack audits.

Practical checklist to implement the SLA scorecard (30–90 days)

1. Assemble stakeholder team: procurement, SRE, security, legal.
2. Define business‑critical flows and regional footprints to weight geographic impact correctly.
3. Deploy synthetics in target regions and collect 12‑month probe data (or purchase third‑party telemetry) — vendor and third‑party coverage models are covered in observability writeups like embedded observability.
4. Gather provider RCAs, status page archives, and public incident reports.
5. Run the scorecard with default weights, then calibrate weights based on business risk appetite.
6. Shortlist vendors based on score thresholds and negotiate contract terms tied to SLOs and runbook commitments.

Negotiation levers informed by the scorecard

When you bring a scorecard to negotiations, vendors treat you like an informed buyer. Use these levers:

• Require automatic SLA credits applied to invoices within 30 days for P1 outages exceeding X minutes.
• Demand RCA SLAs (e.g., preliminary RCA in 48 hours, full RCA in 15 days) and a remediation plan with timelines — if public bodies are involved, see the public-sector incident response playbook for expectations on RCAs.
• Bind runbooks to the contract for your use cases (e.g., CDN purge, DDoS mitigation, failover triggers).
• Ask for operational KPIs on a quarterly executive dashboard showing incidents, MTTR, and change failure rate.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

• Relying solely on provider uptime numbers: Always cross‑validate with independent probes and incident timelines.
• Overfitting to short windows: Don’t draw conclusions from a single quarter—use decay weighting but keep a multi‑year horizon.
• Ignoring correlated failures: If multiple providers share the same DNS or backbone provider, your redundancy may be illusory.
• Underestimating communication quality: Fast, transparent communication often matters more than a slightly better MTTR.

Actionable takeaways

• Build an SLA scorecard that marries observed telemetry with SLA contract terms—don’t treat SLAs as legal fine print only.
• Weight recent incidents more heavily and penalize systemic dependency coupling.
• Use scores as negotiation ammunition: convert high‑priority SLOs into explicit contract clauses (credits, RCAs, runbooks).
• Operationalize score tracking: run the scorecard quarterly and tie it to procurement and incident response playbooks.

Final note — the real value: speed and confidence in procurement

In 2026, procurement teams are judged on speed, risk reduction, and measurable outcomes. A well‑constructed SLA scorecard gives you a repeatable, auditable way to compare hosting and CDN vendors by real‑world outage performance. It reduces debate, accelerates vendor selection, and turns SLA language into operational levers you can enforce.

Ready to move from anecdote to evidence? Build your first scorecard this quarter, validate it in a pilot RFP, and require vendors to commit to SLO‑driven terms in the next contract cycle.

Call to action

Download the free SLA Scorecard template and step‑by‑step methodology to run your first vendor comparison. Apply it to your next RFP and share the results with procurement and engineering to lock in more resilient contracts and architectures.

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