Managed Cloud Service Level Agreement

This Service Level Agreement (the “SLA”) applies to customers with an active, paid Managed Cloud service. It forms part of the Managed Cloud Terms of Service.

It does not apply to a suspended service, a trial instance, a staging or sandbox instance, or to software you run yourself outside Managed Cloud.

We target 99.9% monthly uptime for your Managed Cloud instance, measured across a calendar month.

Availability is measured at our infrastructure edge from at least two independent monitoring locations, at intervals of one minute or less. A single failed check is not downtime. Downtime starts at the first of two consecutive failed checks and ends at the first successful check.

Backups are the part of this service that matters most on the worst day you will ever have. These are the commitments.

Requesting a restore

• Restores are requested from the Backups page in the Managed Cloud portal, or by contacting support.
• A restore overwrites current data with the contents of the chosen backup. We will always confirm in writing with a named person on your side before we run one.
• Restoring to a separate copy, so you can inspect the data without touching production, is available on request and is the option we will usually recommend first.
• Restores caused by our fault are free. Restores caused by a mistake on your side, such as staff deleting records, are also free up to twice in any 12-month period. Beyond that we may charge for the engineering time.

Security patching may require a brief restart. Where the risk justifies it, we will apply the patch first and notify you afterwards rather than wait for a maintenance window.

How we secure the platform more broadly is described in the Data Processing Agreement and the Privacy Policy.

• Planned maintenance expected to interrupt service is notified to the account owner at least 5 business days in advance.
• It is scheduled outside business hours wherever the work allows.
• We aim to keep planned interruptions under 60 minutes in any calendar month.
• Planned maintenance notified in line with this clause does not count as downtime.

Emergency maintenance may be carried out at any time to protect the security, integrity or availability of the platform. We will notify you as soon as it is practical to do so, and emergency maintenance is treated as downtime unless it was required by something in clause 8.

Managed Cloud support is by email, by phone and through the ticket queue in the Managed Cloud portal. Tickets give you a written trail, so they are the channel we recommend for anything that is not urgent.

A response target is our first meaningful reply from a person who can act, not an automatic acknowledgement, and not a promise of resolution. We set severity when the ticket is opened. If you think we have called it wrong, say so and we will review it immediately.

• We manage DNS records for domains you connect to your instance, and we bind and renew certificates for them.
• DNS changes you request through the portal are applied within 1 business day. Propagation across the internet afterwards is outside our control.
• Where you own the domain, its registration and renewal remain your responsibility unless we have separately agreed to manage them.
• We will alert you when a connected domain is approaching expiry, if the registrar exposes that information to us. That alert is a courtesy, not a commitment, and it does not transfer responsibility for renewal to us.

The availability commitment does not apply to unavailability caused by any of the following.

• Planned maintenance notified in line with clause 5.
• Emergency maintenance required to address an active security threat.
• Anything genuinely outside our reasonable control, including a national network failure, a regional data-centre outage, civil unrest or an act of government.
• Failure or degradation of a third-party service you asked us to integrate with, including payment gateways, messaging providers and registrars.
• Your own network, devices, browsers or local internet connection.
• A domain of yours that expired, or DNS you changed outside the portal.
• Custom code, a plugin or an integration added to your instance at your request.
• Use that breaches the Acceptable Use Policy, including load that we have asked you to reduce.
• Suspension for non-payment, or any period covered by clause 9 of the Terms of Service.
• A restore you asked us to run, for the duration of that restore.

If we miss the availability commitment in a calendar month, you are entitled to a credit against your next managed service invoice.

How to claim

• Claim within 30 days of the end of the month concerned, through a support ticket or by email to the Managed Cloud team.
• Tell us the dates and approximate times you were unable to use the service. Our monitoring records are the reference, and we will share the relevant extract with you.
• We respond to a claim within 10 business days.
• Credits are applied to a future managed service invoice. They are not paid in cash and they are not transferable.
• Credits in any single month are capped at 50% of that month's managed service fee.

Service credits are your sole and exclusive financial remedy for a failure to meet a service level, as stated in clause 8 of the Terms of Service. They are separate from a refund. The Refund Policy explains the difference.

Credits are not the answer to a service that keeps failing. If we miss the availability commitment in three consecutive calendar months, or in any four months within a rolling twelve, you may end the managed service immediately by written notice and we will refund the unused portion of your current term, calculated pro rata.

Clause 9 of the Terms of Service applies from that point. Your perpetual licence is unaffected, and the free data export described there is available in full.

• We may update this SLA. A change that reduces a commitment takes effect at your next renewal, never mid-term.
• A change that improves a commitment takes effect when published.
• The account owner is notified by email of any change that reduces a commitment, at least 60 days before your renewal date.