DigitalOcean SLA credit: how the 99.99% Droplet guarantee pays out (and how to claim it)
DigitalOcean's CPU Droplet SLA commits to 99.99% monthly uptime per Droplet and pays a 100% service credit below it — no tiers. Here is what counts as downtime, what the credit covers, the two-billing-cycle deadline and the exact email to send.
Most cloud SLAs make you do arithmetic: find your uptime, find the band it falls in, multiply a percentage by your bill. DigitalOcean's Droplet SLA skips almost all of that. It has one threshold and one credit — and a short, specific claim process that is easy to miss if you file it like a normal support ticket.
Does DigitalOcean pay SLA credits for Droplet downtime?
Yes. DigitalOcean's CPU Droplet SLA commits to a Monthly Uptime Percentage of 99.99% for each individual Droplet, and if a Droplet falls below that in a month, the service credit is 100% — there are no intermediate tiers. The credit applies only to the charges for the affected Droplet, is credited toward future invoices rather than refunded, and must be requested by email to success@digitalocean.com within two billing cycles of the month the downtime occurred.
That is one of the most generous published tariffs among the vendors we track — and one of the easiest to lose, because 99.99% is a very small budget and the claim is yours to make.
What does the 99.99% Droplet SLA actually promise?
| Term | DigitalOcean CPU Droplets |
|---|---|
| Commitment | 99.99% Monthly Uptime Percentage |
| Unit of measurement | Each individual Droplet — not your account |
| Period | Calendar month |
| Credit below 99.99% | 100% (single flat threshold, no tiers) |
| Credit applies to | Charges for the specific affected Droplet |
| Form of credit | Credit toward future invoices; non-refundable |
| How to claim | Email success@digitalocean.com |
| Deadline | Within two (2) billing cycles of the month the downtime occurred |
Source: DigitalOcean's CPU Droplet SLA (last updated 3 June 2025), transcribed into Ontracko's DigitalOcean SLA profile.
How much downtime does 99.99% allow?
Very little. Monthly Uptime is (total minutes in the month − minutes of Unavailability) ÷ total minutes in the month. A 30-day month has 43,200 minutes, so 99.99% allows about 4.3 minutes of Unavailability; a 31-day month allows about 4.5. A single five-minute loss of connectivity on one Droplet is, on the arithmetic, enough to cross the line for that Droplet's month. For the general version of this calculation, see what a 99.9% SLA actually allows — at 99.99% every figure there shrinks by a factor of ten.
What counts as downtime for a Droplet?
DigitalOcean defines Unavailability narrowly, and both halves require a failure of DigitalOcean's infrastructure:
- Loss of connectivity to the Droplet over its public, reserved or private IP; or
- Loss of read/write access to the Droplet's root disk.
Three consequences follow.
It is per Droplet. If one Droplet in a fleet of twenty loses connectivity, one Droplet breached. The credit applies to that Droplet's charges, not your account total — so your claim has to name the affected resources.
A regional incident is not automatically your downtime. An incident on DigitalOcean's status page tells you something happened in a region or product; it does not prove *your* Droplet was unreachable, or for how long. Your own monitoring — ping or HTTP checks against the Droplet's IP, with timestamps — is what turns a status-page event into a claimable figure. See how SLA uptime is measured for why vendor-side and customer-side clocks disagree.
Your own faults don't count. The SLA excludes scheduled maintenance, restrictions on your account, misuse, errors in your application or configuration, and factors outside DigitalOcean's reasonable control. A Droplet you rebooted, a firewall rule you broke, or an app that crashed on a healthy host is not Unavailability.
Does the Droplet SLA cover Kubernetes, databases or Spaces?
Not this one. DigitalOcean publishes a separate SLA per product — App Platform, Managed Databases, Spaces, Volumes, Kubernetes (DOKS), Load Balancers, Container Registry, GPU Droplets — each with its own commitment and credit terms. The Droplet SLA's Unavailability definition does mention DOKS worker nodes' connectivity, but for anything that is not a CPU Droplet, read that product's own SLA page before quoting a figure. We cover CPU Droplets here because that is the page we have transcribed and verified; we state no figures for the others.
How to claim a DigitalOcean SLA credit
- Confirm the downtime was on a CPU Droplet and caused by DigitalOcean's infrastructure — loss of connectivity over its public, reserved or private IP, or loss of root-disk read/write access — and not by maintenance, your configuration or your application.
- Pull your evidence: monitoring logs showing the Droplet unreachable, with start and end timestamps, plus the matching incident on DigitalOcean's status history if there is one.
- Compute the month's uptime for each affected Droplet: (minutes in month − minutes unavailable) ÷ minutes in month. Anything under 99.99% qualifies — roughly 4.3 minutes in a 30-day month.
- List every affected Droplet individually. The SLA is per Droplet, so a fleet-wide outage is a list of Droplets, not one claim for the account.
- Email success@digitalocean.com with the email address on your DigitalOcean account, the affected Droplet resource details, and the outage dates and times.
- Send it within two billing cycles of the month the downtime occurred. Diary the deadline the day the outage ends — nobody will remind you.
- Check your next invoices. DigitalOcean says verified credits are issued within one billing cycle, applied to future Droplet charges.
What are the common ways to lose a DigitalOcean credit?
- Filing through the wrong channel. The SLA names an email address. A generic support ticket about an outage is a support ticket, not a credit request.
- Filing for the account instead of the Droplet. Without resource details the claim cannot be matched to the per-Droplet commitment.
- Waiting. Two billing cycles sounds generous until month-end close, and then it isn't. Missed windows are the single most common way SLA credits are forfeited.
- Relying on the status page alone. It establishes that an incident happened, not that your Droplet was down for a given number of minutes.
- Assuming another product's terms. A Managed Database or Spaces outage is governed by that product's SLA, not the Droplet one.
One more: some third-party summaries of DigitalOcean's SLAs describe a written-notice requirement within 24 hours of downtime starting. The CPU Droplet SLA we read contains no such clause. If you are claiming under a different DigitalOcean product, check that product's own page for notice requirements rather than trusting a summary — including this one.
Frequently asked questions
Does DigitalOcean refund downtime?
Not as cash. DigitalOcean's CPU Droplet SLA pays a service credit — 100% below 99.99% monthly uptime — applied to charges for the affected Droplet and credited toward future invoices. The SLA states that credits are non-refundable.
What is DigitalOcean's uptime SLA for Droplets?
A Monthly Uptime Percentage of 99.99% for each individual CPU Droplet, measured over the calendar month. Below that, the credit is 100% with no intermediate tiers.
Am I owed a credit if my Droplet was down for 10 minutes?
Probably, if the downtime was caused by DigitalOcean's infrastructure. 99.99% of a 30-day month allows about 4.3 minutes of Unavailability, so ten minutes of lost connectivity or root-disk access breaches it for that Droplet. You still have to request the credit, with the Droplet details and timestamps, within two billing cycles.
How long do I have to claim a DigitalOcean SLA credit?
Within two billing cycles of the month in which the downtime occurred, by email to success@digitalocean.com. The window runs from the month of the outage, not from the date you noticed it.
Is the DigitalOcean SLA per Droplet or per account?
Per Droplet. The commitment is stated for each individual Droplet instance, and the credit applies only to charges for the specific Droplet resources affected.
Does the Droplet SLA cover Managed Databases or Spaces?
No. DigitalOcean publishes separate SLAs for Managed Databases, Spaces, Volumes, Kubernetes, App Platform, Load Balancers and other products, each with its own terms. Read the product-specific SLA before filing.
Is a DigitalOcean SLA credit the same as a refund?
No. It is a service credit — a reduction on future invoices for the affected resource. For the distinction, see SLA credit vs service credit and what an SLA credit is.
Methodology & caveats
The 99.99% per-Droplet commitment, the monthly uptime formula, the Unavailability definition, the flat 100% credit, the per-Droplet credit scope, the non-refundable credit-toward-future-invoices form, the email claim route, the required details, the two-billing-cycle deadline and the exclusions are transcribed from DigitalOcean's published CPU Droplet SLA (last updated 3 June 2025) into Ontracko's vendor profile. The downtime allowances (about 4.3 and 4.5 minutes) are our arithmetic on DigitalOcean's formula, not DigitalOcean figures. Ontracko scores status-page incident duration, which is evidence that an event happened; DigitalOcean determines Unavailability from its own records, so your own per-Droplet monitoring is the stronger evidence. Vendors revise SLAs — check the DigitalOcean SLA page and the source document before filing. Compare how other vendors pay in which SaaS vendors actually pay SLA credits, see the reliability rankings, and look up any term in the SLA glossary.
*At 99.99%, a DigitalOcean breach can be over in five minutes and forgotten by the next stand-up. Ontracko watches the DigitalOcean status feed for free, timestamps every incident, and reminds you before the two-billing-cycle window closes. Monitor DigitalOcean free — 8% only on recovered credits. See DigitalOcean live status or open the DigitalOcean SLA page.*
Related reading
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Or browse the SLA glossary and the reliability rankings.
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