A 99.9% uptime promise pays 5% of one month - and the deal page never says so
Answer first: A 99.9% uptime promise on a cloud hosting deal is backed by a published credit, but the credit is not on the page that advertises the number. Read on 25 September 2026, Hostinger's cloud hosting page puts 99.9% uptime in its page title and in its body copy, and links to four legal documents: its privacy policy, its refund policy, its universal terms of service, and a registrant-data policy. None of the four contains the remedy. The universal terms of service defers it outright, stating that the uptime guarantee "if any, is defined in other documents (e.g., specific Service agreement)". The document that actually pays is the hosting agreement, which the deal page does not link to: its section 7 publishes a credit of 5% of the monthly hosting fee for the month in which the 99.9% figure was missed, claimable within 30 days of the interruption, usable only for further purchases, and subject to eleven listed exclusions. The credit is flat, so a 44-minute shortfall and a month-long outage produce the same 5%. On the Cloud Startup monthly rate the pricing page displays for a 48-month term, 5% is about $0.40; on the renewal rate the same page displays, about $1.30.
Published: 2026-09-25 00:10
What this guide adds
This page keeps two things apart throughout. First, what the provider's own pages state, each statement tied to the URL it came from and quoted only in short fragments. Second, the arithmetic and the document-trail reasoning this site ran on top of those statements, labelled (derived). The minute allowances, the cash values of the 5% credit and the 3.25x spread between the two published monthly rates are arithmetic on the provider's own printed numbers and nothing else. No uptime measurement was taken, no monitoring was performed, and no price, discount, credit amount, outage duration, claim record or success rate has been estimated, converted or inferred. Cells the provider does not publish are printed as not published rather than filled in from another provider's page.
What the deal page states, and what it links to
Three pages were read on 25 September 2026 (UTC): the cloud hosting page at hostinger.com/cloud-hosting, the VPS hosting page at hostinger.com/vps-hosting, and the pricing page at hostinger.com/pricing. The provider's robots.txt allows all three. It disallows only its special-offer subpaths, cart, API proxy, tag pages, query-string variants and one AI-builder path, and none of those covers the URLs used here.
The cloud page states the uptime figure twice in its own markup. Its page title and its social-preview title both read "Managed cloud hosting | 4X more speed | 99.9% uptime". In the body, under the heading "Stable and secure", it states: "99.9% uptime, daily backups, and DDoS protection so busy days stay online and client data stays put."
The word guarantee appears on that page four times, and every one of them is the same offer: a 30-day money-back guarantee. The word credit appears once, as "15 vibe coding credits (one-time gift)". The exclusions, the claim window, the credit percentage and the document that contains them appear nowhere on the deal page.
What the page does link to is four legal documents: /legal/privacy-policy, /legal/refund-policy, /legal/universal-terms-of-service-agreement and /legal/non-public-registrant-data-request-policy. The hosting agreement is not among them, and a search of the delivered HTML finds no link to it.
The VPS page behaves differently again. It states no uptime percentage at all. Its uses of the word uptime are a testimonial from a named customer, a line about looking after "the speed, uptime, and stability of our physical servers", and a link to a system status page. It carries the same 30-day money-back guarantee, with the instruction "See our refund policy for details."
The chain from the advertised number to the actual remedy
The remedy sits two links away from the page that advertises the number. Here is the chain, quoted from each document in turn.
Step one, the universal terms of service, last revised 15 July 2026. Section 5, "Availability of site and services, beta services", states: "The service uptime guarantee applicable to specific Services, if any, is defined in other documents (e.g., specific Service agreement) that form part of the Agreement." That sentence is the deferral. This is the document the deal page does link to, and it declines to state the remedy.
Step two, the hosting agreement, last revised 28 August 2026. This is the "specific Service agreement" the terms of service points at, and it is not linked from the cloud hosting page. Its section 7 is headed "Service uptime guarantee" and reads: "We offer a Service uptime guarantee of 99.9% (Service Uptime Guarantee) of available time per month. If we fail to maintain this Service Uptime Guarantee in a particular month (as solely determined by us), you may contact us and request a credit of 5% of your monthly hosting fee for that month. The credit may be used only for the purchase of further products and services from us, and is exclusive of any applicable taxes."
Step three, the exclusions and the deadline, which follow in the same section: "The Service Uptime Guarantee does not apply to service interruptions caused by: (1) periodic scheduled maintenance or repairs we may undertake from time to time; (2) interruptions caused by you from custom scripting, coding or the installation of third-party applications; (3) outages that do not affect the appearance of your website but merely affect access to your website such as FTP and email; (4) causes beyond our control or that are not reasonably foreseeable, including, but not limited to, DDOS attacks and IP blacklists; and (5) outages related to the reliability of certain programming environments; (6) interference with internet connectivity at the customer's ISP; (7) interference with internet connectivity that occurs on one of the routes which is the connectivity path from the customer to our server; (8) browser caching or DNS issues; (9) your fault or negligence; (10) interference caused by other parties; (11) violation of our Terms and Conditions. Claims for the failure of the guarantee above can be claimed within a maximum of 30 days after the interruption occurred."
One further exclusion sits in a different part of the same agreement. In the GPU service terms: "The Service Uptime Guarantee set out in the Agreement does not apply to the GPU Service."
So the number a buyer reads on the deal page resolves, two links later, into a 5% credit that the buyer has 30 days to request, measured by the provider alone, and reduced by eleven stated exclusions.
What the published numbers work out to (derived)
Everything in this section is this site's arithmetic on the figures quoted above. None of it is a statement by the provider, and none of it is a measurement.
The allowance. A guarantee of 99.9% of available time per month leaves 0.1% of the month outside the promise. Using ordinary unit conversions - 24 hours to a day, 60 minutes to an hour - that allowance is 43.2 minutes in a 30-day month, 44.64 minutes in a 31-day month, 41.76 minutes in a 29-day February and 40.32 minutes in a 28-day February. The agreement does not define "available time", so whether the provider measures against the calendar month, the billing month or something else is not published.
The credit does not scale with the failure. Section 7 sets the credit at 5% of one month's hosting fee for the month in which the guarantee was missed. It sets no second tier for a longer outage and no multiplier for severity. On the text as written, a 44-minute shortfall and a total outage lasting the whole month produce the same 5%.
The value on the plan the deal page leads with. The pricing page displays Cloud Startup at $7.99 per month for a 48-month term, with a 48-month total of $383.52 and a renewal rate of $25.99 per month. Five percent of $7.99 is $0.3995, or about 40 cents. Five percent of $25.99 is $1.2995, or about $1.30. The renewal-based figure is about 3.25 times the promotional one, because the two published monthly rates differ by that factor.
The ambiguity is the provider's, not this page's. Section 7 says "your monthly hosting fee" without saying which monthly figure it means, and the two candidates above are printed on the same provider's pricing page with a 3.25x spread between them. The cloud page adds a further wrinkle: it states that "the price displayed is the monthly rate excluding applicable taxes" and that "the total price for the plan to be paid upfront at checkout includes the monthly rate multiplied by the number of months in your plan, along with any applicable taxes." The monthly figure is therefore a derived display value for a plan that is paid upfront, not a monthly invoice.
How many failures it takes to matter. At 5% per qualifying month, a customer would need twenty separate months, each with a qualifying failure and each claimed inside its own 30-day window, to accumulate credits equal to one month's fee. Nothing in the agreement aggregates claims, and nothing in it converts a single severe outage into a larger remedy.
The credit is not money (derived from published terms)
Section 7 is explicit that the credit is not cash: it "may be used only for the purchase of further products and services from us, and is exclusive of any applicable taxes." Three other published documents bound what that instrument can do.
The refund policy, last revised 8 September 2026, lists the products available for refund under standard terms and then lists the products not available for refunds. "Hostinger Credits" appears in the second list, alongside items such as paid support services and GPU hosting. So a credit issued under the uptime guarantee is an instrument the provider's own refund policy does not convert back into money.
The universal terms of service describes how credits held in the customer balance behave: they "are non-transferrable and they may only be used in the Account, in which they were acquired", they "will not accrue and Hostinger will not pay any interest for your benefit", they "may expire", and they "will expire after 2 (two) years from their issuance". If the account is terminated, remaining credits "will be forfeited".
One distinction is worth keeping sharp, because the same document uses the word credit in two unrelated ways. The terms of service sentence stating that refunds issued as balance credits are "made at sole Hostinger's discretion and are not mandatory upon the Customer's request" is about refunds, not about the uptime guarantee. The uptime credit has its own wording, in section 7 of the hosting agreement, and that wording is "you may contact us and request a credit of 5%", with the failure "solely determined by us".
The practical result is that the uptime remedy is scoped to future spending with the same provider, expires, cannot be transferred, and cannot be cashed out under the provider's own published rules. The 30-day money-back guarantee the deal page advertises is a separate instrument. The refund policy states that products "may be refunded only if canceled within 30 days of the date of the transaction", lists hosting plans as available for refund under standard terms, and gives VPS hosting plans their own conditions in a separate section. A refund on cancellation and a credit for downtime are two different mechanisms, and only the first one is advertised on the deal page.
Who decides, and where the guarantee stops (derived)
Two phrases in section 7 do most of the work of narrowing the promise. The first is "as solely determined by us": the provider, not an independent measurement, decides whether the guarantee was missed. The second is the 30-day deadline, which starts at the interruption and runs out whether or not the customer noticed it. Neither an uptime report nor a public status page is named in section 7 as the evidence a claim must cite.
The universal terms of service adds a sentence that reads more broadly than the credit. In the same section 5 that defers the guarantee, it states that the site may be inaccessible "for any reason including, but not limited to, maintenance, repairs or upgrades, or factors beyond our reasonable control (including, but not limited to, equipment failure, network issues, other failures or unforeseeable disruptions)", and that "we assume no liability to you or any other party with regard thereto." Read beside section 7, the pattern is a liability disclaimer in the document the deal page links to, and a capped, expiring credit in the document it does not.
The exclusions deserve reading against the headline number, because several of them cover the failures a customer is most likely to meet. Exclusion 3 removes outages that leave the site itself looking fine but block FTP or email. Exclusion 8 removes browser caching and DNS issues, which is the mechanism by which a site most often becomes unreachable for some visitors while staying reachable for others. Exclusion 4 removes DDoS attacks and IP blacklists. Exclusion 10 removes "interference caused by other parties". Exclusion 11 removes anything the provider considers a violation of its terms. What remains inside the promise is a narrower class of interruption than the 99.9% headline suggests on its own.
The GPU carve-out is the cleanest boundary in the agreement, because it is stated as an absolute: the guarantee "does not apply to the GPU Service", which the same section describes as provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis.
What this check cannot tell you
The unknowns are worth naming, because they are the part a deal page leaves out.
No uptime measurement was taken here. This check compared published text. It did not monitor a server, and no page read cites a third-party uptime record. Whether the provider has ever missed 99.9% in a month, and whether any customer has ever received the 5% credit, is not published on any page read.
The three legal documents carry revision stamps - the universal terms of service 15 July 2026, the hosting agreement 28 August 2026, the refund policy 8 September 2026 - but the two deal pages carry none. The uptime claim was read on 25 September 2026 and can change without notice.
No currency conversion and no regional variation was assessed. The prices quoted here are the ones displayed to this reader on 25 September 2026. The pricing page states that "prices are listed without VAT", and the cloud page states that its monthly rate excludes applicable taxes. The 5% credit is stated to be exclusive of applicable taxes as well, so no tax-inclusive value for the credit is published.
And this check says nothing about whether 5% is a good or a poor remedy by the standards of the industry. That would require the same three things - the promise, the remedy and the exclusions - from other providers, which sits outside the two deal pages and three legal documents read here.
A repeatable method for reading an uptime promise
An uptime percentage on a deal page is a headline, and the terms behind it are usually one or two clicks away. The check takes about ten minutes per provider.
First, note where the number appears. A figure that has reached the page title and the social preview card is a marketing headline, and it will be stated there without qualification.
Second, list every legal document the page links to, then search each one for the percentage. If the number is not in any of them, the remedy is in a document the page did not link to, and that absence is the finding.
Third, look for the words the promise is actually made of: credit, compensation, service level, remedy, claim. A page can say uptime many times and remedy zero times.
Fourth, read the exclusions before the percentage. Count them, and check whether the common causes of an unreachable site - DNS, caching, upstream network, third-party interference - are on the list. An exclusion list is where a headline guarantee becomes a narrow one.
Fifth, convert the remedy into what it is worth and what it can buy. A percentage of a monthly fee is not a cash refund, so check the refund policy for whether that credit is refundable, and check the terms for whether it expires. Then write not published in the cells the provider leaves empty - the measurement method, the claim evidence, the past claim record - instead of filling them from a neighbouring provider's page.