Where 99.95% is used

Common on paid infrastructure tiers, managed Kubernetes, and the higher tier of a tiered SaaS SLA. Often the level offered to enterprise customers who asked for four nines and negotiated.

What it demands

Automated failover, because 22 minutes is not enough time to wake someone up and have them think. Detection has to be automatic and the recovery path has to already exist.

One step either way

Dropping to 99.9% widens the monthly budget to 43m 12s. Moving up to 99.99% cuts it to 4m 19s.

Measuring it

You cannot report on a service level you are not measuring at a finer resolution than the budget itself. At 99.95% the monthly allowance is 21m 36s, so a check interval anywhere near that figure will miss breaches entirely. Work out your own numbers, or monitor it continuously from four regions, free to start.