Web Site Availability Service Level Agreement

Hosting Accounts

ITS provides web sites and servers with the best performance, highest availability, and great customer service. ITS offers a 99.9% Guaranteed Uptime policy that is arguably better than some of the "leading cloud providers" which have smaller credits and/or require all your servers to be inaccessible to qualify. Subject to the terms of the Guaranteed Uptime policy, a customer's Web site will be up and available at least 99.9% of the time in any given calendar month, or the customer will receive a credit towards his or her next month's Web hosting services, according to the current Service Level Agreement.

ITS invested significant time in planning our infrastructure, equipment, services and support to provide the best service available. Our infrastructure uses a "private cloud" environment consisting of redundant servers with automatic failover, redundant routers, 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, and on- and off-site backup systems. With multiple separate and diverse fiber Internet connections, our data center can immediately re-route traffic to another backbone if one suffers service interruptions such as a denial of service attack, allowing our customers' web sites to remain up and running. And, with our Uptime policy - we guarantee it!

We would not be providing web hosting services if we had only the minimum levels of service and equipment. We will continue to anticipate and meet the performance and service needs of our customers.

Service Level Agreement

1. Coverage; Definitions

This Web Site Availability Service Level Agreement applies to you ("customer") if you have ordered the following services ("Services") and your account is in good standing (not past due):

Category Plans Covered
Shared Hosting Shared Mini, Shared Basic, Shared Plus
Shared Windows
Advanced Hosting Linux VPS 1-6
Custom virtual servers
Exchange Hosting All hosted Microsoft Exchange plans billed by ITS

As used herein, the term "Web Site Availability" means the percentage of the 30-calendar-day window prior to the claim that the content of a client's web site or server is available for access by third parties via HTTP and HTTPS, as measured by ITS.

As used herein, the term "Exchange Server Availability" means the percentage of a particular month (based on 24-hour days for the number of days in the subject month) that the hosted Microsoft Exchange service is available for access via Outlook, as measured by ITS.

2. Service Level

ITS's goal is to achieve 100% Web Site Availability for all customers.

3. Remedy

In the event that there is no Web Site Availability, ITS will credit the monthly service charge for the Service as calculated below and as measured using 24 hour days in the subject month, with the credit being calculated on the basis of the monthly service charge for the affected Services:

Web Site Availability
Equal To Or More Than
Web Site Availability
Less Than
 Credit Percentage
99.9% 100% 0%
99.5% 99.9% 10%
99% 99.5% 30%
98% 99.0% 50%
0% 97.9% 70%
Exchange Availability
Equal To Or More Than
Exchange Availability
Less Than
 Credit Percentage
99.999% 100% 0%
99.0% 99.999% 3%
98.0% 98.99% 5%
95.0% 97.99% 10%
90.0% 94.9% 25%
0% 89.9% 2.5% per 1% downtime
(max. 50% of monthly bill)

4. Exceptions

Customer shall not receive any credits under this SLA in connection with any failure or deficiency of Web Site Availability or Exchange Server Availability caused by or associated with:

  1. circumstances beyond ITS's reasonable control, including, without limitation, acts of any governmental body, war, insurrection, sabotage, armed conflict, embargo, fire, flood, strike or other labor disturbance, interruption of or delay in transportation, unavailability of or interruption or delay in telecommunications or third party services, denial of service attacks against your account, virus attacks or hackers, failure of third party software (including, without limitation, ecommerce software, payment gateways, chat, statistics or free scripts) or inability to obtain raw materials, supplies, or power used in or equipment needed for provision of this SLA;
  2. failure of access circuits to our providers' networks, unless such failure is caused solely by our providers;
  3. scheduled maintenance and emergency maintenance and upgrades;
  4. DNS issues outside the direct control of ITS;
  5. issues with FTP, POP, IMAP, or SMTP customer access;
  6. false SLA breaches reported as a result of outages or errors of any ITS measurement system;
  7. customer's acts or omissions (or acts or omissions of others engaged or authorized by customer), including, without limitation, custom scripting or coding (e.g., CGI, Perl, HTML, ASP, etc.), any negligence, willful misconduct, or use of the Services in breach of ITS's Terms and Conditions and Acceptable Use Policy;
  8. e-mail or webmail delivery and transmission;
  9. DNS (Domain Name Server) Propagation;
  10. outages elsewhere on the Internet that hinder access to your account. ITS is not responsible for browser or DNS caching that may make your site appear inaccessible when others can still access it. ITS will guarantee only those areas considered under the control of ITS: our providers' server links to the Internet, our providers' routers, and our providers' servers.

Credit Request and Payment Procedures

In order to receive a credit, customer must make a request by sending an email message to ITS Technical Support. Each request in connection with this SLA must include the server name, user ID, or a domain name on the account in question and the dates and times of the unavailability, and must be received by ITS within ten (10) business days after customer's Web Site was not available. If the unavailability is confirmed by ITS, credits will be applied within the next billing cycle after ITS's receipt of the credit request.

Notwithstanding anything to the contrary herein, the total amount credited to a customer in a particular month under this SLA shall not exceed the total hosting fee paid by customer for such month for the affected Services. Credits are exclusive of any applicable taxes charged to customer or collected by ITS and are customer's sole and exclusive remedy with respect to any failure or deficiency in the Web Site Availability of customer's Web site.

Order