Azure now offers a 99.9 percent service-level agreement (SLA) commitment option on single-instance virtual machines with Premium Storage

Just to show Microsoft's commitment to it's infrastructure in Azure to host your Virtual Machines, it has now increased it's SLA to the highest yet 99.9%

Previously, receiving an SLA required a minimum of two virtual machines configured for high availability. However, some IT organizations need SLAs for single-instance virtual machines, forcing those virtual machines to stay on-premises. With this new option in Azure, we are empowering organizations to move more workloads to the cloud.

To qualify for the single-instance virtual machine SLA, all storage disks attached to the virtual machine must be our Premium Storage, which offers up to 80,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 2,000 MB of disk throughput per virtual machine. Customers can continue to build for high availability by having two or more virtual machines deployed in the sameavailability set, which provides a 99.95 percent SLA, or by utilizingAzure Virtual Machine Scale Sets.

For more information about our SLA for Azure Virtual Machines, please visit the SLA for Virtual Machines webpage. For more information on Premium Storage and how to begin migrating your workloads, please visit theDisk Storage webpage.

What is an SLA?

This stands for service level agreement. It is what service providers agree with their customers on uptime of a service before a payment or credit will be applied to their bill.

What is the Refund?

Microsoft are not offering a refund, but service credit which can be used for the following months server : 

< 99.9% Uptime = 10% Service Credit

< 99% Uptime = 25% Service Credit