A) Service Level Agreement Notice: The issuance of SLA Credits (defined below) is the sole and exclusive remedy of Customer and The Company’s sole and exclusive obligation, for any failure by The Company to satisfy the requirements set forth in the SLA.
B) Support Requests: The Company live support will be available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, year round. You may request support by opening a support ticket via the Customer Portal, technical support address, or by telephone if you are subscribed to the support level with phone support.
B-1) Response Times: We will respond to your support requests made via ticket or telephone within the following time frames:
- MONITORING RESPONSES: Server and service down alerts will be acknowledged within 15 minutes;
- TICKET RESPONSIVENESS: Customer questions made in tickets will be acknowledged within one hour for tickets opened between 8:00 AM and 10:00 PM Eastern Time, within 8 hours of other hours. Resolution times are dependent on the particular circumstances and are not guaranteed;
- RESTORE REQUESTS: Customer restore requests will begin within 2 hours provided that the destination location is available and the requested data is available in the backup repository. We will respond to you via support ticket, telephone call, or both depending on the severity of the situation and consistent with any procedures we have established with you for your account.
B-2) Remedy: If we fail to meet the response time commitments stated in this Support section, you are entitled to a credit of $50 per event, up to 100% of your monthly recurring fee for the affected hosted system for any calendar month. The response time commitments stated above do not apply to support requests made outside of our ticket system.
C) Power: A/C power to the outbound port on your serving power distribution unit (PDU) will be available 100% of the time.
D) Network: The data center network will be available 100% of the time. “Network” means the portion of the network extending from the outbound port on your edge device to the outbound port on the border router and includes The Company managed switches, routers, and cabling. Network availability is defined as the ability to pass TCP/IP traffic with less than 3% packet loss and less than 30ms latency across the The Company network infrastructure.
E) Remedy for Power and Network: If The Company fails to meet any of the commitments stated in this “Data Center” section and the failure adversely affects your hosted system, you are entitled to a credit in the amount of 5% of your monthly recurring fee for the affected hosted system per half hour of power outage or network downtime, up to 100% of the monthly recurring fee for the affected components for any calendar month.
F) Hardware Repair or Replacement: The Company will begin repairing or replacing failed hardware components provided by The Company within one (1) hour of problem identification by The Company. This commitment does not include the time required to rebuild your system, such as the time required to configure a replacement device, rebuild a RAID array, reload the operating system, reload and configure applications, and/or restore from backup (if necessary).
G) High Availability Network Device Solution: A “high-availability” network device solution means two devices within a single data center (such as a firewall, load balancer, router, or switch) configured in a fail-over configuration. High availability network device solutions will be available 100% of the time. The Company will work with you to test the reliability of the high availability solution as part of the implementation process; proper testing must be completed for this commitment to apply.
H) Remedy for Hardware Replacement and High Availability: If The Company fails to meet the commitments stated in sections F and G and the failure adversely affects your hosted system, you are entitled to a credit in the amount of 5% of your monthly recurring fee per half hour of downtime (after the one hour from problem identification referenced in section F), up to 100% of the monthly recurring fee for the affected component for any calendar month.
I) Data Back Up: We will back up your data only if you have purchased data backup services, otherwise Customer is solely responsible for ensuring that its data is backed up in the event of an outage. There is no resolution guarantee and no guarantee of backup integrity.
J) Data Back Up Solution: Unless a custom backup solution is agreed to in advance, backups will be performed to a shared Managed Backup Infrastructure on a scheduled basis. Backups will be retained for the time agreed in the service description or other written agreement. The default backup schedule is nightly backups with a seven day retention period.
K) Data Restoration:
- LOCAL RESTORES: We will initiate restoration of your data stored onsite within two (2) hours of the time that you request the restore via a support ticket.
- REMEDY: If we fail to restore the data that you have selected for backup in accordance with the standards stated in this “Restoration of Backed Up Data” section, you are entitled to a service credit of $250 per event, up to 100% of your monthly recurring fee for the affected configuration for any calendar month.
L) Service and System Monitoring: Service and System Monitoring is available as an addon service or is included in select support plans. These provisions only apply to customers with active system monitoring.
- Availability Monitoring: The Company will monitor up to 6 TCP ports (HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, etc.) per server for service availability. General server availability is tested every five (5) minutes via ping. You will be alerted via ticket if port or ping monitors fail three consecutive times.
- Fault Monitoring: The Company monitors status events on servers and network devices including network availability, process status, file system and capacity.
- Performance Monitoring: The Company monitors key performance metrics for the operating system, select applications and databases.
- Notification of Monitoring Alerts: We will notify you of monitoring alerts within the time frames stated in the “Support” section above.
- Remedy: If we fail to meet the monitoring alert notification commitments stated in this “Monitoring” section, you are entitled to a credit of $250 per event, up to 100% of your monthly recurring fee for the affected hosted system for any calendar month.
M) Limitations on Credits:
- Cumulative Dollar Amount: Notwithstanding anything in this SLA to the contrary, the maximum total credit for any calendar month for failure to meet Service Level commitments under this Agreement, shall not exceed 100% of your monthly recurring fee for the affected hosted system. Credits that would be available but for this limitation will not be carried forward to future months.
- Maintenance: You are not entitled to a credit for downtime or outages resulting from Maintenance. “Maintenance” means: A) NODESPACE MAINTENANCE WINDOWS: upgrades or repairs to shared infrastructure, such as core routing or switching infrastructure that we scheduled at least 72 hours in advance and that occurs during off peak hours in the time zone where the data center is located; B) SCHEDULED CUSTOMER MAINTENANCE: maintenance of your configuration that you request and that we schedule with you in advance (either on a case by case basis, or based on standing instructions), such as hardware or software upgrades; C) EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE: critical unforeseen maintenance needed for the security or performance of your configuration or The Company’s network. We require that all servers remain patched to the approved The Company patch level.
- Force Majeure/Extraordinary Events: You are not entitled to a credit for downtime or outages resulting from an event of Force Majeure (as described in Section 19.6 of the TOS), denial of service attacks, virus attacks, hacking attempts, and/or any other circumstances that are not within our control.
- Your Breach of the Agreement: You are not entitled to a credit if you are in breach of the Agreement at the time of the occurrence of the event giving rise to the credit until you have cured the breach. You are not entitled to a credit if the event giving rise to the credit would not have occurred but for your breach of the Agreement.
- Disabling or Removing of Monitoring or Security Services, Interference with Services: You must notify us in advance if you plan to disable, block, or remove any monitoring or security element of your hosting service for more than thirty (30) minutes. We will not issue you any credit for events that might have been avoided or mitigated if you had not disabled, blocked or removed our monitoring or security elements, or otherwise interfered with our ability to provide the Services.
- Logical Access: This SLA is contingent on The Company having full logical access to your configuration. No credit will be due if the credit would not have accrued but for your restriction of The Company’s logical access to your configuration.
- Data Center Upgrades: We are constantly upgrading our data center facilities and in order for you to benefit from these upgrades, you agree that we may relocate your servers within our data centers, make changes to the provision of the Services, URLs and your IP addresses and may establish new procedures for the use of the Services. In each case we will give you reasonable advance notice and use all reasonable endeavors to minimize the effect that such change will have on your use of the Services.
N) Measurement of Time: For the purpose of determining whether a credit is due, time periods will be measured from the time stamp generated by our ticket system, or the time an interruption is recorded in our monitoring system, as applicable. You may open a support ticket to document the start time for a support request or other incident, or if you contact us by telephone to request support, we will open a ticket. If you contact us by phone, there may be a delay between the time of the call and the time we open a ticket.
O) Making a SLA Credit Request: You must request a credit in writing either via a support ticket or by postal mail no later than seven (7) days of submission of the initial trouble ticket or support call. We will contact you within 30 days to approve or reject the claim or to request more information. If the claim is approved, the credit will appear on your monthly invoice following approval.