Managed VPS Server
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
The remedies set out in this SLA are your sole and exclusive remedies for any failure of the
service.
This Service Level Agreement (SLA) describes a guaranteed level of service and forms part of your contract, which applies to Swift Internet VPS Servers, and Dedicated Server rentals only. These terms are in addition to our standard terms and conditions which apply to all products.
Our Service Level Guarantee is calculated monthly, and based upon figures produced by our own systems.
Network
Scope
The Service Level Guarantee covers the network and servers owned or by Swift Internet only.
Guarantees
The Swift Internet Network will be available for no less than 100% of the time in any calendar month.
Remedies
Service credits: 1% of your monthly fee for each hour in excess of the guarantee, up to a maximum of 100% of the monthly subscription.
Server Uptime
Scope
The Service Level Guarantee covers the VPS server availability based upon network ping responses from the server.
Guarantees
The Server will be available (pinging) for no less than 100% of the time in any calendar month.
Remedies
Service credits: 1% of your monthly fee for each hour in excess of the guarantee, up to a maximum of 100% of the monthly subscription.
Server & Service Monitoring & Failure Response
Server and service monitoring refers to the automated monitoring which is put in place to alert our team when a server or service on a server fails. We respond to those failures by troubleshooting the issue to restore the service back to working order. The SLA refers to the time taken to respond to the alerts and restore the service to working order.
Scope
A set of key services will be monitored by Swift Internet’s monitoring systems. The services monitored will vary by operating system and application, but will typically include:
Web Server (Apache or IIS)
SQL Server (MsSQL or MySQL)
IMAP/POP3 Mail Server
SMTP Mail Server
DNS Server
Network Connectivity
Free Disk Space.
Guarantees
We will monitor the services 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, and respond to failure alerts with 30 minutes of receipt of a failure alert, and guarantee to clear the fault within 60 minutes of the initial response.
Remedies
Service credits: 1% of your monthly fee for each hour in excess of the response guarantee, up to a maximum of 50% of the monthly subscription.
Support and Server Management
The support and server management services refer to the technical support and server administration conducted by us to help you operate your server and troubleshoot issues with the operation of your server.
Scope
Support and Server Management included within our service to you is comprised of the following in relation to your managed server provided by us:
● Troubleshooting and resolution of issues affecting the operation of pre-installed software (e.g. Apache, SQL, Plesk)
● Upgrade, patching, configuration, of pre-installed software
● Installation of additional modules for pre-installed software (e.g. PHP modules)
● Installation of additional software components for pre-installed software, subject to our sole discretion to maintain a stable service.
● Troubleshooting and resolution of server hardware, virtualisation platform, and network connectivity issues
For the avoidance of doubt, the following are outside the scope of our support:
● Website software development / installation / debugging.
● Operation of end users personal computer or device.
● End-user questions/technical support regarding email troubleshooting, or operation of server software.
● End user operational tasks within the Plesk control panel interface (e.g. creating a new mailbox)
You are required to provide first tier technical support to your end users and reproduce any reported problems before escalating to Swift Internet with clear and precise steps to reproduce the reported behaviour.
Guarantees
Support is provided on a 24 hours per day 365 days per year basis.
We aim to provide customers with a fast and efficient technical support service at all times, and aim to respond to support requests within 60 minutes. We also guarantee that the maximum response time to any new support request will be 8 Hours.
Response times start from the time a support ticket is created in our helpdesk, until the time a support engineer logs an initial response within the ticket. This response will usually provide the findings of the support engineer’s initial investigation into your issue.
We take responsibility for resolving a wide range of issues of greatly varying complexity, so a reasonable time for resolving one type of issue may be unreasonable for resolving another type of issue. Some issues may also require us to create support tickets with suppliers. (e.g. Parallels for Plesk)
For this reason we are unable to guarantee the resolution time for support requests, although other elements of this SLA provide fault repair guarantee times for service issues.
We request that one ticket is created per issue, and only one issue per ticket. If we determine that multiple tickets are opened for related issues we may merge the related tickets and reply to you only in one ticket. Any such superfluous tickets will be closed and excluded from this guarantee.
Ticket Escalations
We offer a ticket escalation method for the majority of our services for use when an issue is having a significant impact upon your business. A ticket may be escalated by calling into our support after creating the ticket via our Helpdesk.
Remedies
Service credits: 1% of your monthly fee for each hour in excess of the guarantee, up to a maximum of 5% of the monthly subscription.
Backups
We take daily backups of your server as part of the service, with at least 21 days of backups held. You have access to a control panel to enable you to restore backups down to individual file level.
Frequency
Backups of your server are taken daily.
Backup Retention Policy
We retain a rolling backup history with at least 21 days of backups held
Guarantees
Backup integrity and availability is important to us, but in certain rare circumstances operational reasons may prevent us from maintaining the target backup frequency or overall number of backups. (For example due to a very large number of files on a server causing the backup to take an extended amount of time to complete.) However, we guarantee to have at least 50% of the configured backups available to restore to your server.
Remedies
Service credits: If less than the number of guaranteed backups are available we will refund
10% of the corresponding service’s monthly fee. Due to the nature of backups, this credit can be performed only once per month.
Service Credit Conditions
● The total value of service credits issued for any service in any one (1) month cannot exceed 100% of the monthly fees paid for that service, or monthly fees on a pro-rata basis if the billing period is not monthly.
● Requests for service credits must be submitted in writing to our accounts department within 5 business days of the incident.
● You must open a support case during the failure in question, including the necessary information about the problem, and steps and information necessary to reproduce the error. The information provided must be sufficiently detailed to enable our support to deal with the issue effectively.
In most circumstances this will be considered as the start time for the downtime.
● Service credits will not be aggregated if multiple failures overlap; you will receive credit as applicable only to the service component which we identify as the root cause.
● Service credits are non-transferable and may only be applied to future service delivery on the account they’re issued to, and cannot be exchanged for cash or other forms of payment. Any outstanding or previously accrued service credits will be forfeited upon cancellation of the Customer’s account.
● All downtime measurements will be exclusively at our discretion, and our sole decision in respect of service credit entitlement and amount will be final and binding.
● Accounts that have payments overdue, or have been in payment arrears two (2) or more times in the previous twelve (12) months, or have outstanding AUP violations, waive any right to claim under this SLA.
● Excludes periods of scheduled and emergency maintenance.
Exclusions
Failure caused by Denial of Service attacks, Hacking attempts, hacking intrusions, 3rd party software, misuse of software or configuration errors.
Where the load applied to the server is beyond the capability of the resources provided by the product. Natural disasters or meteorological phenomenon, fire, flood, explosion, accident, acts of terrorism, acts of any governmental authority, acts of God, war or other outbreak of hostilities, riots or other civil disturbance, strike or other industrial disputes, criminal damage, acts or omissions of providers of telecommunication services, or other force majeure occurrence.
Matters beyond our reasonable control.
Periods of scheduled and emergency maintenance.
These terms are in addition to our standard terms and conditions which apply to all products.