Uptime Guarantee
It boils down to this: we guarantee that our services are solid enough to maintain 99.9% uptime. If they’re not then you get credited that month’s payment, or you may request a refund if you choose to move to another provider. We don't pro-rate your refund like other hosts -- if we don't meet our goal, then we didn't do our job, and you don't need to pay for the month's service. It's that simple.
Now, on to the details:
Definition: 99.9% uptime over a month amounts to about 45 minutes of unavailability total over the month. We strive for 100% uptime minus security and software updates (usually under 5 minutes per month), but our guarantee is 99.9% until we start offering high availability plans in mid-to-late 2007.
Limitations: This covers those things that are within our control, which mostly translates into: your web pages will be served; your database server will be available; and your e-mail services will be running.
It’s important to note that there are a number of places where “the internet” can fail from a client’s perspective that have nothing to do with us, and these are not the sort of things we’re inclined to reimburse you for. Specific exclusions include (but are not limited to):
- Your local ISP being unavailable, so you can’t get access the services we’re providing.
- Huge increases in ‘net congestion that affect large portions of the Internet. Your clients may not be able to get to your site because the newest worm is propagating at an unsustainable rate, but that’s more a failure of the Internet in general than it is of our services.
- Your client may not receive your e-mail for some reason not related to our services. Companies are trying all sorts of things to reduce spam, and sometimes these attempts result in lots of missing e-mail. We’ll help you diagnose the problem, but if it’s not on our end, then it’s not eligible for compensation.
- Sometimes Internet backbone providers do things to hurt the Internet, like throwing away all packets intended for a competitor. In these cases, it’s possible that your clients won’t be able to get to our site. It’s a terrible thing, but it’s beyond our control, and isn’t something we cover.
- You may install software that gets hacked and results in down-time for your site. We can’t guarantee the integrity of the software you choose to install – our promises are limited to the software we use to provide the basic services you build on. This also covers applications you install via Easy App (included in your plan) or that we install at your request -- we make popular software easy to install, but we don't guarantee it's safe to use.
- Your database may get corrupted due to a problem with the application talking to it. We’ll do what we can to help diagnose and resolve the issue, but we won’t compensate you for damage caused by a bug in your application.
Basically, if it's our fault you get a free month. If it's something beyond our control, then you don't. Common sources of outages like hardware failures and security issues in our hosting software are things that are covered under this policy, and we do everything we can to protect against these problems.
Filing a claim: Just log in to your control panel and submit a support ticket requesting credit under our guarantee. Please mention the failure you’ve experienced and the date and time it occurred. We will verify that the incident is covered, give you your credit, and will work to insure that a similar failure never happens again.
Waiving the guarantee: there may come a time when we're going to move your account to a new server (or even to a server in a different city) in order to provide you with better service. While these moves can be performed quickly, they may require more than 45 minutes of down time. In these cases we will coordinate with you ahead of time to find the best time to move your account, and we may require you to agree not to invoke this guarantee for downtime causes by the move.
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