Last Updated: 2021-11-04

Definitions:

  • Host: Web.Eng and/or its Parent Company
  • Owner, User, You, Your: You, The paying Customer.
  • Scheduled Maintenance: maintenance (e.g. repairs, modifications, or upgrades) that is announced at least 48 hours in advance;

This Service Level Agreement (the “SLA”) is an integral part of your agreement with Host for the provision of services (collectively the “Services”) set forth on the Service and Pricing Order Form.

This SLA defines the terms of our responsibility with respect to the Services that we provide (the Service Commitments) and your remedies in the event that we fail to meet these Service Commitments. This SLA and the refunds set forth herein (the Service Credits) represent Host’s sole obligation and your sole remedy for our failure to meet such Service Commitments.

Your Site vs. Our Service

Your WordPress website is unique to you. You’ve chosen the plugins, the theme, and made any manner of customization to it. Your audience is also unique to your site. They may purchase goods, browse articles, or vote in an online poll. These choices and decisions are all factors that influence how your site may perform: Random site A may easily handle millions of page views, while Random site B may barely handle 10 visitors concurrently before suffering performance problems. Each site will perform differently under identical hosting plans. Therefore in nearly every case: A 503 error on your site is not an outage of our service.

There are some cases where our service would be to blame though: we misconfigured something, our automation failed, or there is a bug in our code. This distinction between your site and our service is important to understand in the context of an SLA.

We at Web.Eng will do everything we can to help you succeed, respond to issues that may arise in a prompt and professional manner, and offer guidance and advice on best practices as it pertains to WordPress performance and security.

Public Cloud IaaS Vendor Risk Acceptance

Parties understand that Host utilizes various Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) “Cloud” vendors for some or all aspects of computing, digital storage, and network services used in the course of delivering the Web.Eng service to customers. These Vendors may include but are not limited to Amazon Web Services (https://aws.amazon.com/), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and/or other public cloud vendors chosen by Host.

Parties agree that the use of cloud IaaS vendors has inherent and implied risks of disruptions in availability, performance, uptime and other aspects of use including but not limited to potential data loss, security issues, and government agency monitoring or interference whether known or unknown. Accepted industry best practices in systems architecture design, information security, and business process have been employed by Host as is commercially feasible to mitigate the possible effects these disruptions may have on our service and our clients use thereof. No guarantee, SLA, warranty, or assurance is offered or implied by Host as it may relate to those events that are or may be reasonably determined outside of Host’s influence or control. You recognize that the Internet is comprised of thousands upon thousands of autonomous systems that are beyond the control of Host. This SLA and the 100% Service Availability Commitment cover the provision of access by Host to the global internet “cloud”. Routing anomalies, asymmetries, inconsistencies and failures of the Internet or IaaS vendor outside of the control of Host can and will occur and such instances shall not be considered any failure of the 100% Service Availability Commitment.

The Service Commitments Under This SLA Are as Follows:

99.99% Availability Guarantee

Host guarantees our service will be available and free of material defects for use by customers at a minimum of 99.99% of the hours in a calendar month. In the event that our service does not experience 99.99% availability in a given month (see Excluded Events below), the following credit schedule will be used.

  • 5-60 Mins : 5%
  • 60-90 Mins: 8%
  • 90-120 Mins: 12%
  • 120-180 Mins: 20%

Thereafter Host will credit 20% of your monthly service fees for each additional three (3) hours of service unavailability experienced up to 100% (for all Service Credits in a given month) of the monthly service fees for those Services affected.

Backups

Host runs a nightly backup to Amazon S3 for each customer. The retention period is 14 days. User may log in to their control panel at any time and click to download a full copy of their site’s files and database. For VPS and Enterprise plans, users may provide their own Amazon S3 credentials and Host will push an additional backup copy to that location each night.

Service Credit Requests

All SLA claims must be filed in writing to Host Accounting (Host) within 7 days of the incident. The support ticket must include all relevant information, including server name, IP address, full description of the incident, and any logs (if applicable). All SLA credits will be issued as credits against future invoices for services.

In order to qualify for Service Credits, you must be current on all payment obligations, not be in violation of the Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy or any other policies and procedures of Host.

Total cumulative Service Credits during any given month shall not exceed your monthly fee for those Services affected.

Host proactively monitors network uptime, infrastructure uptime and hardware availability. The results of these monitoring systems shall provide the sole and exclusive determination of network uptime, infrastructure uptime and hardware availability.

Excluded Events

No Service Credits will be given for service interruptions: (i) caused by the action or failure to act by you or your personnel, (ii) due to failure of any equipment provided by you, (iii) which are the result of scheduled maintenance, (iv) due to a force majeure event, (v) for which you are entitled to a Service Credit for the same or contemporaneous Service Commitment failure or (vi) resulting from your breach of the Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy or any other policies and procedures of Host (vii) any issue arising as a result of a failure, outage, negligence, or other disruption of service at the underlying IaaS provider.

Right to Modify

Host may modify any aspect of this SLA with or without prior notice. Should you wish to terminate the Service as a result of such modification, you may do so by sending a termination notice to Host any time prior to the effective date of such modification. Absent such termination notice, the modified SLA shall apply from the effective date for as long as you continue to retain Services from Host.

Support Desk Response Times

Host makes the following Time to First Response (TTFR) for customer-generated support inquries via our support desk based upon issue severity.

Severity Level Description Target TTFR
1. Critical Service is down / High risk of service downtime 2 hours
2. Urgent End-user impact initiated 4 hours
3. High Potential for performance impact if not addressed 8 hours
4. Normal General Correspondance 24 hours

In the event three (3) or more instances in a given month our service does not meet these criteria (see Excluded Events), the following credit schedule will be used.

  • 3 Breaches : 15%
  • Each Additional : 10%