This SLA sets out what we commit to, how it is measured, and what you get if we fall short. It forms part of the Terms of Service and applies to shared hosting and business email services on an account in good standing.
1. Uptime commitment
We target 99.9% monthly network and server availability for shared hosting.
99.9% of a 30-day month allows roughly 43 minutes of unplanned downtime.
Availability is measured from our external monitoring, which checks each server every 60 seconds from multiple locations. A service counts as unavailable when two consecutive checks from different locations fail.
2. What is excluded
Downtime does not count against the commitment where it results from:
- planned maintenance announced in advance under section 5;
- emergency maintenance required to close a security vulnerability;
- your own application — a plugin conflict, a database left in recovery,
an exhausted resource limit, code you deployed;
- your account being suspended for non-payment or for an [Acceptable
Use Policy](/legal/aup) breach;
- a domain expiring, or nameservers pointed away from us;
- failures at a third party we do not control — a registry, Microsoft
365, a certificate authority, or a customer's own DNS provider;
- a denial-of-service attack targeting your site, during active
mitigation;
- force majeure.
3. Service credits
If we miss the commitment in a calendar month you may claim a credit against the monthly fee for the affected service:
| Monthly availability | Credit |
|---|---|
| 99.9% – 100% | None due |
| 99.0% – 99.89% | 10% of the monthly fee |
| 95.0% – 98.99% | 25% of the monthly fee |
| 90.0% – 94.99% | 50% of the monthly fee |
| Below 90% | 100% of the monthly fee |
How to claim. Open a ticket within 30 days of the end of the affected month, with the dates and times you observed the outage. We check it against our monitoring and apply any credit to your next invoice.
Limits. Credits are applied to future invoices and are not paid in cash. Total credits in any month cannot exceed that month's fee for the affected service. Service credits are your sole remedy for missed availability. An account with an overdue invoice is not eligible until the invoice is settled.
4. Support response targets
Support is provided in English by our team in Manchester. Targets are measured to the first substantive human reply, not an automated acknowledgement.
| Priority | What it means | Target first response |
|---|---|---|
| Urgent | Site or email completely down, or a live security incident | 1 hour, 24/7 |
| High | Major function broken; a workaround exists | 4 working hours |
| Normal | General issue, configuration question, how-to | 1 working day |
| Low | Feature request, billing query, account admin | 2 working days |
Working hours are 09:00–17:30 UK time, Monday to Friday, excluding England & Wales bank holidays. Urgent tickets are monitored outside those hours.
These are targets rather than contractual commitments, and no service credit attaches to them. We publish our actual performance against them on request.
5. Planned maintenance
Routine maintenance happens in the window 01:00–05:00 UK time, when traffic is at its lowest. Most of it causes no interruption at all.
Where an interruption is expected we give at least 72 hours' notice by email and on the announcements page.
Emergency maintenance to close an active security vulnerability may happen with less notice, or none. We will tell you as soon as we reasonably can, and always within 24 hours.
6. Backups
| Plan | Frequency | Retention |
|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting | Daily | 14 days |
| Shared hosting with the backup add-on | Daily, plus weekly full | 30 days |
| Business email (Microsoft 365) | Per Microsoft's own retention | Per Microsoft |
Backups are stored separately from the production server and encrypted at rest. One restore per month is included free; further restores are charged at our standard hourly rate.
Please read this bit. Backups are a best-efforts convenience. We do not warrant that every backup will be complete or restorable, and our liability for a failed restore is limited as set out in the Terms of Service. Keep your own independent copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.
7. Data centre and network
Our shared hosting runs in UK data centres with N+1 power and cooling, redundant upstream transit, and 24/7 on-site staff. Customer data stays in the UK or EEA unless you ask otherwise.
8. Changes to this SLA
We may update this SLA. Where a change reduces a commitment on a service you already hold we will give at least 30 days' notice by email, and the change takes effect at your next renewal.