Service Level Agreement (SLA)
This Service Level Agreement describes the services provided by Orc Webhosting in detail. If you have any questions regarding this SLA, please contact us.
1. Webhosting environment.
(a) Network and infrastructure. Orc Webhosting guarantees a 99.9% uptime of the network and hardware infrastructure.
(b) Platform. Orc Webhosting guarantees a 99.9% uptime of all software provided and thus a full functionality of the public services, including but not limited to: the operation System (GNU/Linux), the HTTP server (Apache), the database server (MySQL), scripting languages (PHP and Perl) and the DNS server (BIND).
(c) Third party commercial software. Orc Webhosting guarantees a 95% uptime of third party commercial software needed for webmastering and administration tasks, including but not limited to: cPanel/WHM, Fantastico DeLuxe and SohoLaunch Pro Edition. In case of a downtime of these applications websites are fully working, only webmastering and administrating activities are unavailable. The reason for this lesser uptime guarantee is that these third party applications use licensing methods that fail as soon as the licensing server of the software provider has problems or the connection between the licensing server and Orc Webhosting's webservers is broken.
(d) Exceptions. An exception from this rule are scheduled maintenances (announced at least 48 hours in advance), major network outages in large portions of the internet and any major catastrophes outside of man's control.
(e) Reimbursement. Should Orc Webhosting fail to deliver a 99% or higher uptime in any given calendar month, customers will have 50% of their monthly fee automatically refunded. Should uptime in any given calendar month fall below 95%, customers will have their full monthly fee automatically refunded. For uptime between 99.9% and 99%, customers can request a partial refund.
2. Support.
(a) Standard Support. Standard support includes answering questions and fixing problems related to the services provided and is free with all accounts. Orc Webhosting may also answer other related questions and help out with problems in a reasonable degree, but has no obligation to do this.
(b) Extraordinary Support. Troubleshooting applications and scripts not provided by Orc Webhosting or in-depth training of the Customer in the use of third party applications or basic internet concepts are considered extraordinary support and need to be covered by Service Units.
(c) Response Times. Orc Webhosting guarantees a 24 hour response time for all support requests. Is a support request not answered by Orc Webhosting within 24 hours, the Customer will receive a free Service Unit as recompensation, to be used within one year from being issued. Response times are determined through the support tool's audit system (Kayako eSupport). There is no guarantee that the Customer will receive the e-mail notification generated by the support system, since it depends on how the Customer's e-mail provider deals with e-mails sent from Orc Webhosting's servers (customers are advised to put the domain orcwebhosting.com on their e-mail whitelist and/or visit the web-based support ticketing system after having submitted a ticket).
3. Management Services.
(a) Management Services. Management Services include everyday webmastering tasks like making small adjustments to webpages and scripts, optimizing images for the web, setting up e-mail accounts, installing addons and themes for third party software and similar activities. These services need to be covered by prepaid Service Units.
(b) Design/Developer Services. Management Services do not include designing or developing concepts, websites or applications from scratch. For such highly qualified and time-intensive work, Orc Webhosting requires a contract to be drawn up in advance. Payment is based either on an hourly rate (currently $60/hour) or on a predefined sum, agreed upon by the parties.
4. Service Units
(a) Service Units. Service Units are used to provide extraordinary support and management services for the Customer. A Service Unit is 15 minutes long and a unit is used up for a service request even if the execution doesn't take up the full 15 minutes. A Service Unit costs $19.95 one time fee. Service Units are usually billed after the requested tasks have been finished. In case of larger tasks that take a longer time, Orc Webhosting might require a number of Service Units to be paid while the work is still ongoing.
(b) Included Service Units. Orc Webhosting's hosting plans include a certain number of monthly Service Units as part of the plan. Unlike purchased Service Units, these expire at the end of the calendar month and can't be carried over to the next month, nor can they be refunded if not used.
5. Backup.
(a) Backing up data. Orc Webhosting provides Enterprise Class Backup for all webhosting customers. The following rotation is used:
- Full account backups
- on-server (dedicated hard drive used only for storing backups)
- daily backups, 3 days rotation
- weekly backups, 2 weeks rotation
- the standard daily/weekly/monthly cPanel backups are also available on this drive (1 day/1 week/1 month rotation)
- off-server (another server in the same datacenter)
- weekly backups, weekly rotation
- off-site (stored on DVDs in a Swiss bank vault)
- monthly backups, 24 months rotation (this service is performed only for account backups with an archive size of 250 MB or less)
- MySQL database backups
- on-server (dedicated hard drive used only for storing backups)
- hourly backups, 24 hours rotation
- off-server (another server in the same datacenter)
- daily backups, 7 days rotation
- off-site
- weekly backups, stored on the monthly DVD
(b) Retrieving backup data. Data retrieval in case of data loss when Orc Webhosting is at fault is provided free of charge. Restoring a full on-server backup (orverwriting the existing account completely) is also free of charge up to twice in a month. Complex backup restoration (like extracting certain files from a backup archive and copying them to specific places in the Customer's account) needs to be covered by Service Units. Requesting off-site data from the bank vault costs $25 per case, for this price the DVD will be taken out of the vault and the backup archive uploaded to the webserver's backup drive. Depending on the kind of backup restoration, additionally Service Units might be required.
(c) Customer-created backups. Despite all measures taken by Orc Webhosting, customers are encouraged to create their own full or partial backups at regular intervals. Customers can use cPanel's built-in Backup Manager for this purpose.
(d) Liability in case of missing or corrupt backups. Orc Webhosting guarantees that the backup files described at (a) are available to the customer in case of need. Should a backup file be missing and no other backup file of comparable usefulness (like a MySQL backup from a couple of hours earlier than requested or a full backup from the previous day than requested) be available, the Customer is entitled to a full refund of last month's hosting fee.
While the existence of the backup files is guaranteed, Orc Webhosting cannot guarantee that (due to misfunction of third party software like cPanel/WHM) backup files won't be corrupt or missing data. In such a case, Orc Webhosting refuses all liability for data loss.
(e) Special backups. Customers who have certain highly important dynamic files that aren't practical to be backuped manually may request their inclusion into specifically written hourly or daily backup scripts on the server. These files will then be packaged with the regular hourly/daily backups and will be stored on-server, off-server and off-site the same way regular backup files are. Prices for setup/maintenance vary, depending on the number and size of the files.
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