Service Level Agreement

Section 5 of the terms of service puts the network on a 99.9% uptime target, with a pro-rated credit whenever a month comes in below it. Here is the arithmetic sitting under that sentence: what gets measured, what does not, and the real value of a shortfall.

Across a 30-day month, 99.9% leaves about 43 minutes of permitted unavailability. Go past that through a fault of ours and a credit follows.

1. What is being measured

Available means the server answers a request for your site over HTTP or HTTPS, asked from outside our own network. We measure it service by service, calendar month by calendar month, in whole minutes, off our monitoring.

Slow is not the same as down: a site that still answers, however sluggishly, does not count. Speed is a genuine concern and support will take it up with you, though this agreement pays out on something else.

2. Time that never counts against the figure

Our commitment reaches the parts of the stack we operate. It cannot reach the parts operated by you, or by anybody else:

• maintenance we announced. Any work that risks visible downtime is booked outside UK business hours, with notice sent beforehand;
• faults living in your own code, your database, your plugins or your configuration, a site felled by its own resource use included;
• suspensions made under the acceptable use policy or for unpaid invoices;
• anything sitting upstream of us: the connection you are on, DNS you have hosted somewhere else, a registry outage, a certificate authority, or some third-party API your site leans on;
• denial-of-service attacks, along with other events beyond reasonable control, for the whole period that mitigation is still running;
• time we were unable to diagnose, since you could not be reached for access that only you hold.

3. Putting a value on a shortfall

We work the credit out against the monthly fee for whichever service was affected, or a twelfth of an annual fee. It then lands on the account and offsets future invoices.

• 99.0% up to 99.89% — 10% of the fee that month;
• 95.0% to 98.99% — 25%;
• below 95.0% — 50%.

Within any one month, credits stop at the fee charged for that service in that month. They are the entire remedy for unavailability, and none of it comes back as cash. Should a month go badly enough that leaving appeals to you more than taking a credit, the refund policy is the other route.

4. Claiming

Nothing is credited automatically, or we would be paying out for downtime that turned out to be somebody's plugin. Open a ticket from the client area inside 30 days of the month in question closing, and put in the service, the dates and times you watched it go down, plus any measurements you took yourself.

That claim gets checked against our own monitoring, and an answer comes back inside five working days. If your records and ours disagree, we put ours in front of you instead of asserting them at you.

5. Backups are separate

The daily copy runs as a courtesy and stands in for nothing you should be doing yourself. Availability is the only thing this agreement pays out on. No credit exists for lost data, and what we owe there stops at restoring the most recent copy in our hands. Keep your own independent backup of anything you would hate to lose.

6. Products this covers

Shared, business, WordPress, WooCommerce and reseller hosting, plus virtual and dedicated servers. Domain registration falls outside it, because whether a name resolves rests with the registry running that extension rather than with us. A third-party licence bought through us carries whatever its own vendor commits to.

7. Who this is with

Hosting & Domains is a trading name of Azaanex Inc., a company registered in Canada under Company No. 1766541-5. Registered office: 5-145 1/2 Church St, Toronto, Ontario M5B 1Y4, Canada. Anything you want to ask about this agreement goes to info@hosting-n-domains.com.