Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Coverage of Agreement

This Service Level Agreement applies to any customer who holds an active account on a Performance hosting plan provided by Hosting Cloud. This does not cover customers using standard Web Hosting plans, domain names, or have outstanding (past-due) invoices, services are suspended due to non-payment, fraudulent activity or violation of the Terms of Service.

Plans covered by this Agreement are:

  • Performance Plus web hosting

  • Performance Pro web hosting

  • Performance Max web hosting

  • Performance Ultra web hosting

  • Performance Custom web hosting

Plans excluded from this Agreement are:

  • Lite web hosting

  • Pro web hosting

  • Max web hosting

Service Commitment

Hosting Cloud is committed to providing services to its customers at a standard of excellence commensurate with the best practice within the IT hosting industry. Hosting Cloud’s goal is to achieve an 100% service availability across all services provided to customers and uses a fully redundant network, enterprise grade switching, routing, firewall and server technology to best achieve this goal.

Support Requests

The customer is able to submit support requests by contacting Hosting Cloud via our website or customer portal. Customer support requests will be handled as soon as possible with priority being given to issues with a more critical severity rating.

Monitoring

Hosting Cloud conducts internal monitoring of all core systems using multiple monitoring platforms. In the event of a services uptime being questioned for SLA based assurances, Hosting Cloud’s monitoring platforms will determine the service uptime and the determination is final.

Service Performance

All services within our network are monitored 24/7 for potential performance issues. As a result, our service offering is generally of an extremely high standard. There are many factors which can impact on the performance of a given service – i.e. software being used, excessive traffic or denial of service attacks, internet connection speeds, usage of a service in a way that it is not designed, misconfigured domain names, nameservers or DNS records. As a result, service performance, speed, degradation, misconfiguration issues are not covered by an SLA.

If you suspect a service related performance issue, please open a support ticket so that we may investigate further.

Website hacking or defacement

Hosting Cloud offers a “best effort” Incident report for website hacking or defacement. We do not guarantee to monitor for such issues, however we have employed security software to disable malicious code or files uploaded to your account to help protect against further hacking or defacement. If we detect and issue, we will contact you and provide information as to the suspected cause and best method of resolution.

As you are given the freedom to upload files to your account, you also have the freedom to unknowingly upload vulnerable or malicious files. Malicious files will be scanned and quarantined by our malware scanners, however there is no such scan for a vulnerable file.

Firewalls, brute force and intrusion detection methods are used on our servers, however it is your obligation to ensure that best practice security measures are followed, e.g. strong passwords, software kept up to date.

Should you discover a hacking or defacement related issue before we do, please open a support ticket so that we may investigate further. After our investigations, we will issue an incident report outlining what has occurred and suggestions to help prevent it from reoccurring in the future.

Scheduled Maintenance

Hosting Cloud maintains a weekly window in order to conduct maintenance related tasks. During this window, parts of Hosting Cloud’s infrastructure may be unavailable for short periods of time. Scheduled and emergency maintenance is not included in availability or uptime calculations.

Hosting Cloud will notify customers of any scheduled outage or downtime during this period with a minimum of 24 hours notification to the customer, but reserves the right to conduct hazardous work during this maintenance window without notification to the customer.

Emergency scheduled downtime may occur due to unforeseen events or security related incidents. Due to the nature of such emergency works, there may be minimal notice provided for such events. We will endeavor to provide as much notification as possible and try and minimise the occurrence of such events.

Notifications for scheduled or emergency maintenance will be posted via email or on the Client Portal.

Change Requests

Any requests for change must be delivered by an authorised customer representative of which can be maintained within our customer portal. Change requests will be completed during business hours and commenced within one business day of the initial lodgement of the change request in writing from the authorised customer representative.


Service Level Uptime

Uptime is the time during which our services are in operation. Downtime refers to a period where our services or systems are inaccessible. Our services and networks are continuously monitored to ensure rapid response should any faults occur.

Web Hosting services are guaranteed to 99.99% uptime each month, an equivalent of 4.38 minutes downtime per month.

If the uptime of the server or network your services are hosted on falls below 99.99% in any given calendar month, we will credit you one (1) month of the total price charged by Hosting Cloud for the impacted service.

Customer Credit

In the event that Hosting Cloud experiences infrastructure or network downtime as a result of SLA breach then Hosting Cloud will apply a credit to the customers’ account in an amount equal to the credits listed in this policy.

Incidents are deemed to begin from the time the Customer lodges a support ticket. All SLA credits must be requested via a support ticket. SLA credit will not be available to clients who have overdue invoices on their account. SLA credit may not exceed monthly fee for any given service.

Compensation Credit

In order to receive hosting compensation, you must submit a request by contacting us by telephone, email or support ticket.

Each request for compensation must include the dates and or times of the unavailability of your service, and must be received by us within 30 days of the server downtime. The credit will be issued as an account credit only and is not transferrable or redeemable for cash.

Scheduled Outages

From time to time upgrades to our systems and networks may be required. Where possible, such upgrades will be performed outside of business hours. We will notify you as far as practicable in advance of such upgrades.

Any scheduled outages will not be included in the total uptime or downtime calculation for the month and compensation is not payable.

Where practical, consideration will be given to your input as to preferred times for scheduled outages to take place. Scheduled outages under normal conditions should not exceed 5 hours per year. All scheduled outages will be posted on the Hosting Cloud websites and client portal. We will include the scheduled date of the outage, the services affected, the reason for the outage, and the estimated time commencement & completion.