If you’ve ever relied on a Certificate Authority (CA) system to issue, manage, or revoke SSL/TLS certificates, code-signing certificates, or any type of digital identity certificate, you know how critical uptime is. A certificate that can’t be issued, or a revocation list that can’t be accessed, can disrupt everything from e-commerce checkouts to internal employee networks. As a CA system supplier, I get asked this question at least once a week: “What’s your uptime guarantee?” CA System
It’s not a question I take lightly. Unlike generic hosting providers that might cite 99.9% uptime as a checkbox, our uptime guarantee for CA systems is tied directly to the core function of what we do: keeping the internet’s digital trust infrastructure running. Let me break down what that guarantee actually means, how we build it, and why it’s not just a number on a sales sheet.
First, let’s define terms properly for anyone who isn’t a CA engineer. When we talk about CA system uptime, we’re not just talking about the main dashboard or a billing portal. We’re talking about three critical components that make up a complete production-grade CA system: the certificate issuance and signing engine, the Certificate Revocation List (CRL) distribution service, and the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) responder. If any of these go down, or if they become unreachable by relying parties (like web browsers or app stores), our customers face outages that can cost them thousands of dollars in lost revenue, or even damage to their brand reputation.
Our formal uptime guarantee for the core production components of our CA systems is 99.99% annually. Wait, that’s a lot higher than the standard 99.9% you see for many enterprise services. Let me put that in context for you. 99.9% uptime translates to about 8.76 hours of downtime per year. 99.99%? That’s just 52.56 minutes of downtime, total, over 12 months. For a CA system, that difference isn’t just a technicality—it’s the difference between a missed CRL update that leaves 10,000+ end-users unable to access a customer’s website, or a 45-minute window where code-signing certificates can’t be issued, delaying a software release.
But here’s the part most vendors won’t tell you: an uptime guarantee is only as good as the systems that enforce it, and the plans you put in place when things do go wrong. Our guarantee isn’t a promise that nothing will ever break. It’s a promise that when something does break, we have the infrastructure and processes in place to fix it fast enough to stay within that 52 minutes of annual downtime.
So how do we build that level of reliability into a CA system? Let’s start with infrastructure. We don’t run our core CA systems on a single server, or even in a single data center. We use a multi-region, multi-cloud architecture with active-active clustering across six geographically dispersed data centers, spread across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. That means if one entire region experiences an outage—whether it’s a power grid failure, a fiber cut, or a cloud provider outage—the other five regions automatically take over traffic without any interruption to our customers or their end-users.
But CA systems have unique security requirements that other services don’t. We can’t just mirror our root and intermediate certificate keys across every server willy-nilly, because that would create a security risk if any one server is compromised. So we use a hardware security module (HSM) fleet, with each HSM isolated in its own hardened environment, and key management protocols that let us sign certificates without ever exposing the private key to a network or a non-secure server. That means our uptime guarantee doesn’t come at the cost of security—we pass annual third-party security audits, and our HSMs are certified to FIPS 140-2 Level 3, the highest level for non-military systems.
Next, monitoring. We don’t just monitor our systems from our own office. We have over 200 synthetic monitors located around the world that check every function of our CA system every 30 seconds. We test certificate issuance, CRL accessibility, OCSP response times, and even the ability to revoke certificates on demand. If any test fails, our on-call engineering team gets an alert within 10 seconds, with exact details on what’s wrong and where. Our average mean time to resolve (MTTR) for production incidents is under 8 minutes. That’s a number we track every month, and we publish internal MTTR metrics for our team to hold ourselves accountable.
We also build redundancy into every part of the workflow, not just the core signing engine. For example, CRLs are not stored on one server in one region—we distribute them to over 50 edge caching locations around the world, so even if our primary distribution servers go down, the cached CRLs are available to relying parties. OCSP responders are clustered, with load balancing that redirects traffic away from any responder that’s experiencing issues. We even have a redundant manual signing process for emergency cases, where we can sign critical certificates offline and deploy them within minutes if our automated systems experience a full outage.
But what about planned downtime? Every system needs updates, right? Security patches, version upgrades, configuration changes. We build all planned maintenance into our uptime calculations, so none of that scheduled work counts towards our downtime limit. When we do need to perform maintenance, we do it during off-peak hours for each region—typically between 2AM and 6AM local time—and we notify all customers at least 72 hours in advance, with a detailed timeline and a plan for how we’ll keep systems running during the update. We’ve never had a planned maintenance window exceed 10 minutes over the last three years.
Now, let’s talk about what our uptime guarantee doesn’t cover, because transparency is important here. It doesn’t cover outages caused by our customers’ actions—like if a customer misconfigures their own integration with our CA system, or if they block our CRL/OCSP endpoints on their firewall. It doesn’t cover third-party services that we rely on that are outside of our control, like public DNS providers that experience outages, or transit providers that have network issues. That said, we build in redundancy for most of these dependencies too—we use three separate transit providers and two independent DNS providers, so even if one goes down, we can reroute traffic within minutes.
Another key part of our offering is our service level agreement (SLA) that formalizes this uptime guarantee. Our SLA includes financial credits if we exceed the 52.56 minutes of annual downtime, with credits ranging from 10% of monthly fees for downtime over 52 minutes up to 100% of monthly fees for any downtime exceeding 4 hours in a month. Unlike many SLAs that have fine print that limits payouts, our credits are straightforward—if you can show that your outage was directly caused by a downtime event in our core CA system, you qualify for credit, no hoops to jump through.
I want to address a common misconception I hear from new customers: “Aren’t all CA systems the same? How do you know your uptime guarantee is real?” The short answer is, you can verify it. We publish monthly uptime reports for all our core services on our customer portal, with detailed logs of any downtime events, their root causes, and resolution times. We’ve had independent third-party audits of our uptime over the last four years, and all of them have confirmed that we’ve met or exceeded our 99.99% uptime guarantee every year. We’re also a member of the CA Browser Forum, the global body that sets standards for certificate authorities, so we’re held to strict industry standards for uptime, security, and transparency.
What does this mean for you, as a customer? If you’re a fintech company processing millions of transactions a day, a 52-minute total annual downtime limit means you’ll almost never experience an outage caused by our CA system. If you’re a SaaS company issuing code-signing certificates to your developers, you won’t miss a release window because our signing engine is down. If you’re a government agency relying on digital certificates for citizen services, you can trust that our system will be there when you need it.
We also tailor our uptime commitments for specific use cases. For example, for customers that run critical real-time applications, we offer a premium support plan with a dedicated account manager and a 99.995% uptime guarantee for their dedicated CA instance. For smaller businesses that don’t need a dedicated cluster, our shared multi-tenant CA system still offers 99.99% uptime, because we build the same redundancy into shared instances that we build into dedicated ones.
Let me share a quick example from a customer of ours to put this in perspective. A mid-sized e-commerce client of ours had a network outage in their primary data center one year ago. They had configured our OCSP responders as their primary source for certificate status, and because our responders are multi-region, we routed their traffic to a secondary responder in Europe while their primary team worked on their network issue. Their customers never noticed a single interruption in their checkout process, and that all came down to our 99.99% uptime guarantee in action.
At the end of the day, a CA system’s uptime guarantee isn’t just a technical metric—it’s a promise of reliability, security, and trust. When you issue a certificate, you’re telling the world that a website, a piece of software, or a service is legitimate. If your CA system is down, that promise is broken. That’s why we invest as much in uptime and reliability as we do in security and compliance.
If you’re looking for a CA system that delivers on its uptime guarantee, whether you’re a small business just getting started with digital certificates or a large enterprise with mission-critical needs, we’d be happy to walk you through our architecture, our SLA, and our uptime track record. We don’t just sell CA systems—we partner with our customers to keep their digital trust infrastructure running, no matter what.
CA System References:
- CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly-Trusted Certificates, Version 2.0
- FIPS 140-2 Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
- Global CA Uptime Benchmark Report, 2023, Independent Security Review Consortium
- HSM Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) Validation Summary List, NIST
Yantai Keda Zhixian International Trade Co., Ltd.
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