Odds data uptime and SLAs: what to expect

For a live betting product, an odds feed's reliability is two things you should ask about separately: uptime (is the feed up) and freshness (is the data current). A supplier that publishes both on a live dashboard is giving you a signal you can verify. A supplier that quotes a single number you cannot check is asking for trust instead. This guide explains the difference, what an SLA really commits to, and what to expect from a feed that carries bet365 among 60+ UK books.

What's the difference between uptime and freshness?

Uptime measures whether the feed responds; freshness measures whether the data it returns is current. They are different failures, and a feed can pass one while failing the other. This is the distinction most reliability conversations miss.

Uptime is the classic availability question: when your product calls the endpoint, does it get a valid response instead of a timeout or an error. Freshness is subtler. A feed can answer every request, on time, with well-formed JSON, and still be serving prices captured twenty minutes ago. It is up. It is also wrong.

This is why both matter for a betting product specifically. Odds move. A weather API can be a few minutes stale and no one notices. An odds feed that is stale is quietly showing opportunities that no longer exist, and your users find out before you do. Judge a feed on freshness with the same weight you give uptime.

What does an SLA actually mean?

An SLA is a supplier's committed target for a measurable property of the service, usually availability, sometimes with credits attached if it is missed. The word carries more authority than it earns. An SLA is a promise about a number; it is only as good as the measurement behind it and the honesty of the party reporting it.

Read any SLA for three things before you weigh the headline figure:

• What is measured: availability of the endpoint is common; freshness of the data almost never appears in an SLA, even though it is the metric that breaks a betting product. Ask whether the SLA covers freshness at all.
• How it is measured: from where, how often, and by whom. A figure computed by the supplier's own server that never leaves the building is not the same as one checked from outside.
• Whether you can see it: a published, live figure you can refresh on demand tells you more than a contractual number you only ever read in a document.

The mechanism matters more than the number. An honest supplier measures availability from off its own infrastructure, so a total outage still gets recorded rather than silently missed, and shows the result openly. We cover the wider buying decision in choosing an odds API.

Why does a published figure beat a promised one?

A published, checkable figure beats a promised one because you can verify it before you commit and monitor it after. A promise sits in a contract; a live figure sits on a page you can open right now. When reliability is the thing you are buying, the ability to check it is part of the product.

The clearest red flag is a "guaranteed 100% uptime" claim. No odds feed is up 100% of the time, and a supplier claiming otherwise is either not measuring honestly or not measuring at all. A real reliability posture reads as "here is our current figure, measured from outside, updated live", never as an absolute guarantee.

Be equally wary of an unqualified "real-time" claim. It usually means the freshness question has not been answered honestly. A precise posture, stated in seconds and shown live, is worth more than a superlative.

What does OddsRelay publish?

OddsRelay publishes both freshness and uptime on the coverage dashboard, so the figure is checkable rather than asserted. We do not quote an uptime percentage in prose, because a number written into a blog post ages the moment it is published; the dashboard carries the real current figure, measured continuously from off our own serving infrastructure.

On speed, our honest posture is pre-match polling on roughly a few-second cycle. That suits pre-match matched betting and pre-match arbitrage well, which is where the durable value sits. We do not claim sub-second in-play streaming, because that is not what we ship, and we would rather state the real cadence than a flattering one. The feed carries 60+ UK bookmakers with bet365 included, each back price matched against lay odds from three exchanges (Betfair, Smarkets, Matchbook), and freshness is tracked per book so a single stale source shows up instead of hiding in an aggregate.

It powers a leading UK matched-betting platform today, where a stale price or a peak-time drop-out would be noticed immediately. That is the standard the reliability figures are held to. For the arbitrage-specific view of what makes a feed dependable enough to build on, see what makes an arb feed usable, and for coverage depth alongside reliability, evaluating coverage.

The short version

Ask any odds-data supplier two questions: what is your uptime, and how fresh is the data. Then ask a third: can I see both, live, right now. A feed that answers all three with a page you can open has nothing to hide. One that answers with a guarantee you cannot check is asking you to take reliability on faith, on the one metric where faith is expensive.

You can see the live freshness and uptime figures on the coverage dashboard before you commit, and a free trial gives you the full UK feed, bet365 included and matched against exchange lay prices, so you can check the reliability against your own product rather than a promise.