Service Level Agreement

The promise, with arithmetic

Clause 5 of the terms sets the network a 99.9% uptime target, with a credit on offer whenever a month falls short. A percentage is easy enough to print and hard to hold anybody to, so the same promise appears below in minutes, exclusions and money.

Inside a 30-day month, 99.9% allows around 43 minutes of downtime. Go past that line for reasons belonging to us, and something is owed to you.

1. The definition of down

Down means a request for your site over HTTP or HTTPS, sent from outside our network, comes back with nothing. Counting happens in whole minutes, service by service, across a calendar month, from our own monitoring.

Slow is not down. Slow still matters to us: raise it and we will chase it. A page that loads badly has nonetheless loaded, and this document only pays out where nothing at all came back.

2. Minutes that never get counted

Our own stack is what we answer for. The following fall outside it, and outside the sum:

• maintenance we announced in advance, scheduled well clear of UK working hours;
• your own application falling over, whether from bad code, a broken migration, a plugin update, or a site that burned through its plan;
• accounts switched off under the acceptable use policy, or against any invoice that remains outstanding;
• faults arising before traffic even reaches us: your ISP, DNS kept somewhere else, a registry going dark, a certificate you controlled that expired, or an API your site cannot function without;
• attacks and force majeure, for as long as mitigation is actively worked;
• delays that arise because we could not reach you for access only you hold.

3. The credit

Calculated against the monthly charge for whichever service went down, or against a twelfth of an annual charge, then applied straight to the account.

• a month landing at 99.0% to 99.89% returns 10%;
• anything from 95.0% down to 98.99% returns 25%;
• under 95.0% — 50% back.

No single month can return more than the charge that month carried for the service. Under this agreement credit is the whole remedy for downtime, and it never gets paid out as cash. Where a month has gone badly enough that you would sooner leave than take a credit, the refund policy covers that instead.

4. Asking for it

No credit lands on its own. Doing it that way would mean paying out for plugin failures, so you have to claim: open a ticket within 30 days of the month closing, naming the service, giving the dates and times it could not be reached, plus any evidence you hold.

Your claim gets set against our monitoring, and a reply comes back inside five working days. Should the two records disagree, we will put ours in front of you rather than simply saying they disagree.

5. Data sits in its own category

Daily backups run here as a courtesy, and they do not replace keeping copies of your own. Nothing in this agreement pays out for data that has gone, and what we owe stops at restoring the most recent copy we happen to be holding. Whatever you cannot afford to lose belongs somewhere outside our control.

6. Which products are covered

Shared, business, WordPress, WooCommerce and reseller plans, along with virtual and dedicated servers. Domains do not qualify, because whether a name resolves rests with the registry behind that extension. A third-party licence bought through us carries only what its own vendor promises.

7. The company

HostingFast is a trading name of Vitalcare at Home Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under Company No. 15098204. Registered office: Office 4648, 221–323 High Road, Chadwell Heath, Romford, England, RM6 6AX. Send claims and any questions to info@hostingfastnet.com.