Service Level Agreement

01

Uptime commitment

Hostethics guarantees the following monthly uptime percentages:

Shared & WordPress hosting: 99.9%
VPS hosting: 99.95%
Cloud hosting: 99.99%
Dedicated servers: 99.99% (network + power)

02

How uptime is measured

Uptime is measured by our internal monitoring plus third-party external monitoring (StatusCake, UptimeRobot). It excludes: (1) scheduled maintenance windows announced at least 72 hours in advance, (2) force-majeure events, (3) issues caused by customer code or misconfiguration, (4) upstream network provider outages beyond our control.

03

Service credits

If we fail to meet the guaranteed uptime in a calendar month, you are automatically eligible for account credit:

< 99.9% but >= 99%: 10% credit
< 99% but >= 95%: 25% credit
< 95%: 50% credit

Credits are applied automatically to your next invoice — no ticket required.

04

Support response times

Our support commitments:

Live chat: First response within 5 minutes, 24/7
Support tickets: First response within 15 minutes, 24/7
Phone callback: Within 15 minutes during UK business hours
Emergency infrastructure incidents: On-call engineer paged within 5 minutes

05

Backup and recovery

We maintain daily encrypted off-site backups with 14-day retention (30 days on Pro / Agency plans). Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is 24 hours. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for full-site restore is 4 hours for Shared/VPS and 1 hour for Cloud/Dedicated.

06

Scheduled maintenance

We aim to schedule disruptive maintenance during off-peak UK hours (typically 02:00-05:00 GMT on weekends). All maintenance is announced at least 72 hours in advance via status page and email.

07

Incident communication

Our public status page updates in real time during incidents. Affected customers receive email notification within 15 minutes of a confirmed incident. Post-incident reports (PIRs) are published for all major incidents within 5 business days.

08

Exclusions

This SLA does not apply to free trials, promotional plans, or beta features explicitly marked as such. It also does not apply to outages caused by: customer application errors, denial-of-service attacks bypassing our mitigation, or the customer using unsupported configurations.

09

Claiming credits

Credits are applied automatically. If you believe you're due a credit that wasn't applied, contact billing@hostethics.com within 30 days of the affected month.