Service Level Agreement

The promise, with arithmetic

Clause 5 of the terms puts the network at a 99.9% uptime target and offers a credit when a month misses it. Percentages are easy to print and hard to hold anyone to, so here is the same promise expressed as minutes, exclusions and money.

Across a 30-day month, 99.9% permits about 43 minutes of downtime. Cross that line for reasons that are ours, and you are owed something.

1. The definition of down

Down means a request for your site over HTTP or HTTPS, made from outside our network, gets no answer. We count in whole minutes, per service, over a calendar month, using our own monitoring.

Slow is not down. We care about slow — raise it and we will chase it — but a page that loads badly still loaded, and this document only pays out when nothing came back at all.

2. Time that is not counted

We are answerable for our own stack. These sit outside it and outside the calculation:

• maintenance we announced beforehand, scheduled away from UK working hours;
• your application falling over — bad code, a broken migration, a plugin update, or a site that exhausted its own plan;
• accounts switched off under the acceptable use policy, or for invoices left unpaid;
• faults that occur before traffic ever reaches us: your ISP, DNS held elsewhere, a registry going dark, an expired certificate you controlled, or an API your site cannot live without;
• attacks and force majeure, while mitigation is actually being worked;
• delays caused by us not being able to reach you for access only you have.

3. The credit

Worked out against the monthly charge for the service that was down, or a twelfth of an annual charge, and applied to the account.

• between 99.0% and 99.89% — 10% back;
• between 95.0% and 98.99% — 25% back;
• under 95.0% — 50% back.

One month cannot return more than that month's charge for the service. Credit is the entire remedy for downtime under this agreement and is never paid as cash. If a month has been poor enough that you would rather leave than take a credit, the refund policy covers that instead.

4. Asking for it

Nothing is credited automatically. Automatic credits would mean paying out for plugin failures, so a claim is required: open a ticket within 30 days of the month ending, naming the service, the dates and times it was unreachable, and any evidence of your own.

We compare it against our monitoring and reply inside five working days. Where the two records disagree we will show you ours rather than simply telling you it disagrees.

5. Data is a separate question

Backups run daily as a courtesy and are not a replacement for keeping your own. Nothing in this agreement pays out for lost data, and our duty there stops at restoring the most recent copy we happen to hold. Anything you cannot afford to lose belongs somewhere we do not control.

6. Which products are covered

Shared, business, WordPress, WooCommerce and reseller plans, plus virtual and dedicated servers. Domains are not: whether a name resolves depends on the registry behind the extension. Third-party licences bought through us carry only whatever their 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. Claims and questions go to info@hostingfastnet.com.