Service Level Agreement

A percentage nobody can hold you to is worth nothing

The terms of service put the network at a 99.9% uptime target and offer a credit when a month misses it. Plenty of hosts print a figure like that and leave it there. This page turns ours into minutes, exclusions and money, so it can actually be argued about.

In a 30-day month, 99.9% allows roughly 43 minutes of downtime. Past that, if the cause is ours, you are owed something.

1. What counts as down

A request for your site over HTTP or HTTPS, from outside our network, getting no answer. Counted per service, per calendar month, in whole minutes, from our monitoring.

Slow is not down. Raise slow as a ticket and we will look at it, but a page that loaded badly still loaded, and this agreement only pays when nothing came back.

2. What does not count

• maintenance we told you about, scheduled outside UK working hours;
• your own site breaking — bad code, a failed update, a plugin, or a site that used up its own plan;
• accounts switched off under the acceptable use policy or for unpaid invoices;
• anything before us in the chain: your internet connection, DNS you host elsewhere, a registry outage, an expired certificate you controlled, or an API your site depends on;
• attacks and events outside reasonable control, while mitigation is actually running;
• time lost because we could not reach you for access only you have.

3. What you get back

Worked out against the monthly price of the affected service, or a twelfth of an annual price, and put on the account.

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

One month cannot return more than that month's price for the service. Credit is the whole remedy for downtime here and is not paid out in cash. If a month has been bad enough that you would rather leave than take a credit, the refund policy is the other door.

4. Asking for it

Nothing is credited automatically, because automatic credits would mean paying out for plugin failures. Open a ticket within 30 days of the month ending, with the service, the times it was unreachable and anything you measured yourself.

We check it against our monitoring and answer inside five working days. Where our records disagree with yours, we will show you ours rather than just saying they disagree.

5. Backups are a different question

Daily copies run as a courtesy and do not replace your own. Nothing here pays out for lost data, and our responsibility stops at restoring the most recent copy we hold. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.

6. What is covered

Shared, business, WordPress, WooCommerce and reseller plans, plus virtual and dedicated servers. Domains are not covered — whether a name resolves is the registry's business, not ours. Third-party licences bought through us carry whatever their vendor promises and nothing more.

7. The company

Hosting-Cheap is a trading name of 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.