Service Level Agreement

An uptime percentage that cannot be enforced is worth nothing

The terms of service put the network at a 99.9% uptime target, with a credit due whenever a month falls short of it. Plenty of hosts print a number of that sort and then leave it sitting there. On this page ours is broken down into minutes, exclusions and money, which makes it something you can actually argue about.

Across a 30-day month, 99.9% permits about 43 minutes of downtime. Go beyond that with the fault on our side and you are owed something.

1. What counts as down

A request to your site over HTTP or HTTPS, sent from outside our network, that comes back with no answer. We count it per service, per calendar month, in whole minutes, taken from our monitoring.

Slow is not the same as down. Send us a ticket about slowness and somebody will look, though a page that crawled in still arrived, and this agreement pays only where nothing came back at all.

2. What does not count

• maintenance announced to you beforehand and timed outside UK working hours;
• a break in your own site, whether from bad code, an update that failed, a plugin, or a site that burned through its own plan;
• accounts switched off under the acceptable use policy or for unpaid invoices;
• anything sitting ahead of us in the chain, such as your internet connection, DNS you keep elsewhere, a registry outage, a certificate under your control that expired, or an API your site leans on;
• attacks and events beyond reasonable control, for the whole time mitigation is running;
• time lost while we sat waiting on you for access that nobody else holds.

3. What you get back

Calculated against what the affected service costs per month, or against a twelfth of an annual price, then applied to the account.

• 99.0% to 99.89% gives 10% of that month back;
• 95.0% to 98.99% — 25%;
• under 95.0% — 50%.

No single month gives back more than what that month's service cost. Credit is the entire remedy for downtime under this agreement, and none of it comes back as cash. Where a month has gone badly enough that walking away appeals more than a credit, the refund policy is the other door.

4. Asking for it

Credits never appear on their own, since automatic payouts would mean settling up for a plugin falling over. Open a ticket within 30 days of the month closing, naming the service, the periods when it could not be reached, plus whatever you measured yourself.

Your claim gets checked against our monitoring, with an answer back inside five working days. Should our records clash with yours, you get shown ours instead of simply being told they clash.

5. Backups sit outside this promise

The daily copies are a courtesy, not a substitute for keeping your own. Lost data pays out nothing under this agreement, and what we owe ends at putting back the newest copy in our possession. Anything you cannot afford to lose, keep a copy of yourself.

6. What is covered

Covered: shared, business, WordPress, WooCommerce and reseller plans, along with virtual and dedicated servers. Domains fall outside it, because whether a name resolves is the registry's affair rather than ours. A third-party licence bought through us carries whatever its vendor promises, and not one thing beyond that.

7. The company

Hosting-Cheap is a trading name for Bohzo Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under Company No. 15031604. Registered office: The Workspace Basildon, 7 High Pavement, Basildon, England, SS14 1EA. Claims to info@hosting-cheap.com.