Service Level Agreement

Section 5 of the terms of service commits the network to a 99.9% uptime target and a pro-rated credit when a month falls short. This page is the arithmetic behind that sentence: what is measured, what is not, and what a shortfall is actually worth.

99.9% of a 30-day month leaves roughly 43 minutes of permitted unavailability. Anything beyond that, caused by us, earns a credit.

1. What is being measured

Availability means the server answering a request for your site over HTTP or HTTPS from outside our network. It is measured per service, per calendar month, in whole minutes, from our monitoring.

A site that answers but answers slowly is not counted as down. Performance is a real concern and worth raising with support, but it is not what this agreement pays out on.

2. What does not count against the figure

The commitment covers the parts of the stack we run. It cannot cover the parts you or somebody else runs:

• announced maintenance. Work that risks visible downtime is scheduled outside UK business hours and notified in advance;
• faults in your own code, database, plugins or configuration, including a site taken down by its own resource use;
• suspensions made under the acceptable use policy or for unpaid invoices;
• anything upstream of us: your connection, your DNS if it is hosted elsewhere, a registry outage, a certificate authority, or a third-party API your site depends on;
• denial-of-service attacks and other events outside reasonable control, for as long as mitigation is actively under way;
• time we could not diagnose because we could not reach you for access you alone hold.

3. What a shortfall is worth

Credit is calculated against the monthly fee for the affected service, or one twelfth of an annual fee. It is applied to the account against future invoices.

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

Credits in a single month are capped at that month's fee for the service. They are the whole of the remedy for unavailability, and they are not paid out in cash. Where a month is bad enough to make you want to leave rather than take a credit, the refund policy is the other route.

4. Claiming

Credits are not automatic, because we would otherwise be crediting downtime that turned out to be a plugin. Raise a ticket from the client area within 30 days of the end of the month concerned, and include the service, the dates and times you saw it down, and anything you measured yourself.

We check it against our own monitoring and answer within five working days. Where our records and yours disagree, we will show you what ours say rather than simply asserting them.

5. Backups are separate

A daily copy runs as a courtesy, and it is not a substitute for your own. This agreement pays out on availability only — no credit is offered for data loss, and our responsibility there does not go beyond restoring the most recent copy we hold. Keep an independent backup of anything you would be unhappy to lose.

6. Products this covers

Shared, business, WordPress, WooCommerce and reseller hosting, and virtual and dedicated servers. Domain registration is not covered: a name's availability depends on the registry that operates the extension, not on us. Third-party licences bought through us carry whatever their vendor commits to.

7. Who this is with

Hosting & Domains is a trading name of UK Health Care Support Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under Company No. 15042717. Registered office: Office 4648, 58 Peregrine Road, Ilford, England, IG6 3SZ. Questions about this agreement go to info@hosting-n-domains.com.