Downtime Response and SLA Guarantees on the Premium Tier
The Build + Launch Premium tier exists specifically for applications where downtime has real consequences,lost revenue, regulatory violations, patient safety risks, or broken service level agreements with your own customers. The Premium tier's 99.99% uptime SLA is not marketing language; it is a contractual commitment backed by financial penalties and a rigorous incident response framework designed to prevent, detect,and resolve outages with minimal impact.
The 99.99% Uptime Guarantee
A 99.99% uptime SLA translates to a maximum of 52.6 minutes of unplanned downtime per year, or approximately 4.4 minutes per month. This is measured on a rolling 30-day basis and excludes pre-scheduled maintenance windows that are communicated at least 72 hours in advance. The measurement is based on end-user accessibility,meaning your application must be reachable and functional from the perspective of your customers, not just running on the server.
What Happens When Downtime Occurs
Despite the infrastructure safeguards, no system is immune to incidents. When downtime occurs on a Premium tier application, the following response protocol activates:
Immediate Automated Response (0-2 minutes)
- Automated monitoring detection: illuminis runs continuous health checks at 10-second intervals across multiple geographic locations. Any failure triggers an immediate alert.
- Automatic failover: if the primary infrastructure fails, traffic is automatically routed to standby systems in a different availability zone. For most incidents, failover completes within 60 seconds with zero customer intervention.
- Alert escalation: the on-call infrastructure team receives immediate notification with diagnostic data about the nature of the failure.
Engineering Response (2-15 minutes)
- Incident commander assigned: a senior engineer takes ownership of the incident and coordinates all response activities
- Root cause investigation: the team begins diagnosing whether the issue is infrastructure-related, application-related, or caused by an upstream dependency
- Status communication: you receive direct notification via your preferred channel (email, SMS, Slack) with initial impact assessment and estimated time to resolution
Resolution and Recovery (15-60 minutes)
- Service restoration: the primary goal is restoring service as quickly as possible, followed by root cause analysis. If a quick fix is available, it is deployed immediately. If a longer fix is needed, the failover systems continue serving traffic while the primary infrastructure is repaired.
- Customer communication: if the outage affects end users, illuminis provides a status page update and direct communication as appropriate
- Verification: automated tests confirm that the application is fully functional before the incident is marked as resolved
Financial SLA Credits
When the 99.99% uptime target is not met in a given month, you are entitled to financial credits applied to your next revenue share calculation:
- 99.9% to 99.99% (up to 43.8 minutes of downtime): 10% credit on illuminis revenue share for that month
- 99.0% to 99.9% (up to 7.3 hours of downtime): 25% credit on illuminis revenue share for that month
- Below 99.0% (more than 7.3 hours of downtime): 50% credit on illuminis revenue share for that month
Credits are calculated automatically and applied without requiring you to file a claim. illuminis publishes monthly uptime reports for all Premium tier applications through the developer dashboard.
Post-Incident Review
Every Premium tier incident that exceeds 5 minutes triggers a formal post-incident review. illuminis shares a detailed incident report with you within 48 hours, including root cause analysis, timeline of events, customer impact assessment,and specific corrective actions to prevent recurrence. This level of transparency is a core commitment of the Premium tier.