Website hosting – Service Level Agreement
Marksmen IT’s Website Hosting Service Level Agreement is a manifestation of our everlasting commitment towards providing unmatched levels of technical support, customer service and customer care. This Website Hosting Service Level Agreement describes service level commitments provided to our customers (“you“, “your“) by Marksmen IT Limited (“the company“,“company“, “Marksmen IT“, “us“, “we” and “our“) for our web hosting services.
1.0 Technical Support
Marksmen IT provides technical support to Customers based on the attached SLA requirements and those recorded in the Terms and Conditions. Marksmen IT also provides higher levels of contracted support to certain clients that sign Customer specific support contracts. Details of these contracts can be obtained from Marksmen IT. The following obligations are Marksmen IT’s standard SLA obligations. If you have signed a Customer specific support contract, then please refer to that document and read in conjunction with the standard obligations recorded in this Agreement.
Under no circumstances will Marksmen IT provide development-related support for web applications, scripts, or components from third parties or those developed by You unless it is agreed upon in writing through a support contract, subject to additional terms and conditions.
Email support is available 7 days a week, expect at most 24 hours for a reply. Please provide us with a full description of the problem and your Account email to assist us in your enquiry. The Company’s standard response time to technical support issues is within six hours. This time depends on the complexity of the enquiry and support request volume. The Customer Service Team assigns the highest priority to customer inquiries related to the servers’ unavailability. These issues are addressed first upon notification from a customer.
Virtual Private Server customers who are on an unmanaged plan will receive support for availability and hardware node issues only.
Support Hours: 9am to 5pm NZST (GMT +12)
Available Monday to Friday.
2.0 Scheduled Maintenance
To maintain optimal performance and security of our servers, Marksmen IT will perform routine maintenance on the servers on a regular basis, which may require servers to be removed from service temporarily. The Company reserves the right to have scheduled downtime for maintenance purposes, which the Customer will be notified of. This server unavailability will not be included in server uptime calculations. The maintenance is typically performed during off-peak hours. The Company will provide You with advance notice of maintenance whenever possible.
The customer acknowledges and accepts that Marksmen IT may have to carry
out emergency maintenance, updates and other procedures to protect the Service (“Emergency Procedures”). Marksmen IT will endeavour to provide as much prior notice as possible to such Emergency Procedures.
Performance of the Service during Maintenance:
Although Marksmen IT will use all reasonable endeavours to maintain the Service Level Agreement during planned Maintenance or Emergency Procedures, the Customer accepts that Marksmen IT will not be held liable for any failure to meet the Service Level Agreement during the maintenance period.
Customer accepts that Marksmen IT reserves the right to amend or change all or any part of the Marksmen IT Infrastructure at any time provided that the performance or functionality of the service is not materially degraded.
3.0 Availability
The Company’s primary commitment is to provide outstanding web hosting services to all customers. To support this commitment, the Company assures at least 99.9% server availability, excluding maintenance. This availability is calculated on a monthly basis. If the Company fails to meet this guaranteed level of availability, the Company will issue a partial refund to the customer at the discretion of the Company. This partial refund is only issued upon your written or email notice to the Company, and will be based according to the length of downtime experienced. Downtime is defined as the customer’s hosted website being unable to be viewed or accessed through the Internet, caused by failure of network equipment managed and owned by Marksmen IT, excluding scheduled or emergency maintenance. This figure does not include availability loss caused by circumstances that are out of the Company’s control such as unavailability of major national communication backbones, Denial of Service attacks and other types of attacks.
Service Target
1.1 The following service levels apply to this SLA.
- Network Uptime – 99.99%
- Server Uptime – 99.99%
- Datacentre Availability: 100%
- Colocation: 99.99%
- Cloud Services: 99.99%
- Dedicated Servers: 99.99%
- VPS servers: 99.99%
- Shared hosting: 99.99%
- Domain names: 99.99%
The service levels stated above will be compared to the server availability as a whole, not to individual client accounts.
Refunds
If availability is below the guaranteed level, Marksmen IT will grant an appropriate refund after the Customer has provided the following:
- Client ID
- Service name
- Evidence of downtime
- Amount claimed
The refund will only be granted for the downtime of the applicable service, and not any other service the company provides for the customer. The Customer must notify Marksmen IT of the availability downtime by emailing [email protected] within 21 days from the date the incident occurred. Any requests after this period will not be considered.
The appropriate refunds will be issued if the service availability level falls below the guaranteed target are stated below.
Service Level Calculations
If your service availability for the full calendar month is below Marksmen IT’s guaranteed service target, we will provide the following appropriate refunds:
- 99.99% – 99.9% – 10% off next month’s applicable service
- 99.9% – 99.7% – 15% off next month’s applicable service
- 99.7% – 99.1% – 20% off next month’s applicable service
- 99.1% – 90.0% – 30% off next month’s applicable service
- Below 90% – 50% off next month’s applicable service
The maximum total penalty of the refund shall not exceed 50% of the monthly fees charged to that account during the month for which the refund is to be issued.
The Customer shall not be entitled to any credit if the network downtime is caused by actions of the customer or others authorised by the customer to use the service under the Agreement.
Limitation of Liability
The customer accepts that the company cannot be held liable under this Service Level Agreement for any failure or deficiency of service availability caused by or associated with incidents that are outside Marksmen IT’s control, including but not limited to:
- acts of any governmental body, fire, flood, earthquake, strike or other labour disturbance, interruption of / or delay in transportation, unavailability of / or interruption or delay in telecommunications or third party services, virus attacks or hackers, failure of third party software;
- Your acts or omissions (or acts or omissions of others engaged or authorized by You), breaching the Company’s Terms and Conditions and Acceptable Use Policy;
- DNS (Domain Name Server) Propagation.
- Outages elsewhere on the Internet that hinder access to your account;
- Lack of availability or untimely response time of Customer to respond to incidents that require their participation for source identification and/or resolution.
4.0 Storage Capacity / Data Transfer
Each account is allotted storage capacity and data transfer amounts on the Company servers according to the plan and options selected by You. This storage size and data transfer allotments can be increased by request for an additional fee. The servers may stop accepting, processing, or delivering data when the purchased limit is reached thus causing server unavailability or data loss. The Company shall not be held responsible for such unavailability or data losses.
5.0 Data Integrity
The Company employs RAID technology on all Marksmen IT-managed servers to ensure data redundancy and integrity in the unlikely event of a hardware failure. The Company offers a routine server backup service for disaster recovery purposes. Marksmen IT-managed servers and client servers utilising Marksmen IT’s backup service are configured to back-up automatically to off-site locations on a scheduled basis. The Server scheduling and scope is at the Company’s sole discretion.
6.0 Data Retention
Marksmen IT shall not be responsible for retaining any data after account termination. All account data is deleted from the server(s) following the termination of an account, and subsequent backups as a result of regular backup schedules. Marksmen IT will not provide any data pertaining to existing or terminated accounts unless agreed to by the company.
7.0 Customer Responsibilities
To access Marksmen IT’s services the customer must provide at the very minimum:
- an Internet connection with sufficient bandwidth and quality to allow trouble-free browsing, data uploading and downloading;
- a fully functional Internet browser;
- tools to develop and publish content as You find suitable and necessary; and
- tools to access database servers if such services are purchased by You.
This Service level agreement runs in conjunction with Marksmen IT’s standard terms and conditions and Master Service agreement.