Distribution infrastructure SLAs are the contractual service level agreements that define the performance guarantees, uptime commitments, account health thresholds, and remediation obligations between a media company and its distribution infrastructure provider. Without clearly defined SLAs, the media company carries all operational risk while the provider collects fees regardless of distribution outcomes.
Most distribution vendors offer SLAs written to protect the vendor, not the media company. They guarantee "platform uptime" — which means nothing for native device distribution — or they exclude account bans entirely, treating them as "platform actions beyond our control." Effective SLAs must be structured around distribution outcomes, not provider inputs.
What Uptime Metrics Actually Matter for Distribution Infrastructure?
Conventional SaaS uptime metrics — "99.9% API availability" — are irrelevant for native device distribution. The API can be available while every device in the fleet is offline. Distribution uptime must be measured at the device and posting level, not the API level.
The primary uptime metric is device fleet availability — the percentage of fleet devices that are online, connected to cellular networks, and capable of native posting during scheduled distribution windows. A 100-device fleet with 3 devices offline during a posting window has 97% fleet availability. The SLA should guarantee minimum fleet availability per posting window, not per month, because distribution windows are time-sensitive.
Secondary uptime metrics include network availability per device and posting success rate. Network availability measures whether each device has functional cellular connectivity. Posting success rate measures whether scheduled content is successfully published to the target platform. According to Akamai's State of the Internet report, network-level failures account for 15-20% of all content delivery interruptions — and those are for optimized CDN infrastructure, not consumer-grade cellular connections.
What Should an Account Health SLA Include?
Account health is the distribution equivalent of data integrity. If accounts get banned or restricted, reach goes to zero regardless of infrastructure uptime. An account health SLA must cover three dimensions.
Account survival rate measures the percentage of fleet accounts that remain in good standing — not banned, not permanently restricted, not shadowbanned — over a defined period, typically quarterly. A healthy fleet maintains 90%+ quarterly survival. Below 85%, the provider should be obligated to replace devices and provision new accounts at their cost.
Restriction notification latency measures the time between a platform issuing a restriction action and the provider notifying the media company. Early notification enables content adjustment and account behavior correction before restrictions escalate to bans. The SLA should guarantee notification within 4 hours of detected restriction, with automated alerts for critical actions within 1 hour.
Content flag rate tracks how frequently posted content receives platform content warnings or rejections. This reflects whether the provider's posting behavior triggers platform content moderation systems. Imperva's Bad Bot Report documents that automation-like posting patterns increase content flag rates by 3-5x compared to organic posting behavior. A healthy distribution fleet should flag fewer than 3% of posts.
How Conbersa Structures Distribution SLAs
Conbersa provides enterprise-grade SLAs built on physical device infrastructure. Our fleet availability guarantee is 99.5% per device per posting window, measured at the individual device level — no aggregate masking. We report device health and posting success rates in real time through a monitoring dashboard accessible to every customer.
We built Conbersa with the understanding that SLAs are only as credible as the infrastructure underneath them. A device fleet SLA is meaningless if the provider cannot monitor individual device health or replace failed hardware within hours. Our operations team maintains hot-spare devices and carrier relationships that enable same-day device replacement when hardware fails. We've seen providers promise uptime while running devices in a closet — we guarantee it because our fleet is professionally managed with redundancy built in at every layer.