Updated on: December 23, 2020

SonicWP provides an industry leading product, and is pleased to support it with this Service Level Agreement (“SLA”). This SLA is hereby incorporated into the Terms of Service, and made a part of it. Terms not defined in this SLA have the definitions set out in our Terms of Service. The remedies set out in this SLA are Client’s sole and exclusive remedy for issues covered by the SLA.

We reserve the right to make changes to this SLA at any time at our sole discretion. If we make changes to this SLA, we will provide notice of such changes by revising the date at the top of this SLA. Your continued use of our Services following notification of changes will constitute your acceptance of such changes. Please periodically review this SLA and check for any updates.

This document uses the Uptime Guarantee of 99.9%. Depending on your Service Plan with us, you may have a 99.95% or 99.99% Uptime Guarantee. If you are such a client, your SLA and SLA credit calculations will be based on that higher Uptime Guarantee.

Summary

For your convenience only, we have summarised the key points of our policy here. This summary does not constitute a legally binding policy. We encourage you to consult the full policy in the sections below.

SonicWP guarantees that your website will be accessible on the the public internet for 99.9% of the time in any given month. Depending on the Service Plan for your website, this guarantee may apply to 99.95% or even 99.99%.

If we do not meet those requirements, we will pay you back at least 2 times what you paid us for each hour of downtime. Depending on the Service Plan for your website, you might be eligible to get back 5 times or even 10 times what you paid us for each hour of downtime.

And we will always, for your benefit, round up the the downtime. So if your website is down for just 2 minutes more than our allowed limits, we will pay you back for a full hour – not just for 2 mins.

The guarantee applies to things we do wrong, which causes your website going offline, outside of our maintenance periods. It does not apply to your website going down as a result of an action by you. If the case of the latter, we will of course help you correct your mistake, but of course there will not be any Uptime Refunds.

1. Definitions

“Necessary Services” means the portions of the Service that must be operational in order for any Website hosted on our platform to be accessible over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Necessary Services do not include any systems, websites, or services external to SonicWP, our control panel, our support system, our website, SSH / SFTP / phpMyAdmin access, or any other part of the Service which is not strictly necessary in order for Client Websites to remain accessible. The Necessary Services also do not include the look, feel and functionality of a website.

“Signup Date” means the date on which you subscribe a website to a Service Plan. This may be different for the different websites you have with us.

“Monthly Renewal Date” unless otherwise stated in your invoice, it means the 20th day of each calendar month.

“Monthly Billing Period” means the time period from the Signup Date until the day before the first Monthly Renewal Date, and from the Monthly Renewal Date until the day before the next Monthly Renewal Date. For example, if the Signup Date is August 7, then the Monthly Billing Period is August 7 through August 19, and the next Monthly Billing Period is August 20 through September 19, etc.

“Client” means the entity that we have entered into contract with, for legal and billing purposes. A Client may have several websites hosted with us, each with its own Service Plan and the respective Uptime Guarantee of that Service Plan.

“Uptime Guarantee” means the Necessary Services will be available at least 99.9% of the time during each Monthly Billing Period. Depending on your Service Plan with us, you may have a 99.95% or 99.99% Uptime Guarantee.

“Downtime” means any period of time in which the Necessary Services are unavailable to the Client’s website.

“Covered Downtime” means the total duration in minutes of Downtime occurring during a Monthly Billing Period. For example:

  • If five websites are hosted on a single Client Account and only one of those Client Websites experiences 60 minutes of Downtime, that shall be counted as 60 minutes of Covered Downtime.
  • If all five Client Websites experience 60 minutes of Downtime concurrently at the same time, that is counted as 60 minutes of Covered Downtime per website (assuming each of those websites has its own Service Plan).
  • If one Client Website experiences 60 minutes of Downtime on Day 1, and the same Client Website experiences 15 minutes of Downtime on Day 2, then that is counted as 75 minutes Downtime against that website.

“Maintenance Period” means Monday through Sunday, 9 pm to 10 pm UK time.

“Effective Plan” means the active Service Plan for the website at the time Downtime occurs.

“Monthly Plan Value” means (a) for Clients on a monthly billing cycle, the Fee paid for the Effective Plan, and (b) for Clients on an annual billing cycle, the Fee paid for the Effective Plan divided by 12. The Monthly Plan Value excludes any other fee or amount, such as, but not limited to, paid add-ons, overages, and migration fees.

“SLA Credit” means the credit as described in this SLA which is added to a Client Account and applied to subsequent invoices because we did not meet our Uptime Guarantee.

2. How SLA Credits will be calculated

In order to determine whether our Uptime Guarantee has been met, Covered Downtime shall be compared to the amount of time in a normal 30-day period (43,200 minutes). If Covered Downtime exceeds 43 minutes (0.1% of the amount of time in a normal 30-day period) it shall be determined that the Uptime Guarantee was not met.

If we fail to meet the Uptime Guarantee, upon request, you will receive SLA Credits equal to at least two times (2x) of your Monthly Plan Value for each full hour (60 minutes) of Covered Downtime – i.e. we give back twice the amount we charged you for that hour of service. Depending on your Service Plan, your SLA Credits may be 5x or 10x.

Covered Downtime shall be calculated based on our monitoring.

Credits are given for every hour of Covered Downtime, that occurs outside of our Maintenance Period, and are rounded up to the nearest hour for your benefit.

For example:

  • If the Covered Downtime is 45 minutes, you will receive one hour of SLA Credit.
  • If the Covered Downtime is 75 minutes (1 hours and 15 minutes), you will receive two hour of SLA Credit.
  • If the Covered Downtime is 121 minutes (2 hours and 1 minute), you will receive three hours of SLA Credit.

If you switch Service Plans during the Monthly Billing Period, your Monthly Plan Value shall be calculated based on the amount of time spent on each plan during the Monthly Billing Period. For example, in a Monthly Billing Period consisting of 30 days, if you spent 10 days on a plan costing £30 per month and 20 days on a plan costing £60 per month, the Monthly Plan Value would be £50 ( [£30 / 30 x 10] + [£60 / 30 x 20] ) and SLA credits would be issued based on the adjusted Monthly Plan Value of £50.

To work out your SLA Credit, multiply your Monthly Plan Value by 12 (to get your Plan’s Annual Value), and divide that by 8,760 (hours in a calendar year). This will tell you how much we charge you for one hour’s service. Multiply that figure by 2x (or 5x or 10x depending on your Service Plan) to get the SLA Credit per hour figure.

For example:

  • Assuming your website is on our Starter Plan and costs £150 per month, it equates to a charge of £0.205 per hour ((150 x 12) / 8760), giving a minimum 2x SLA Credit of £0.41 per hour.
  • Assuming your website is on our Pro 3M Plan and costs £2,600 per month, it equates to a charge of £3.562 per hour ((2600 x 12) / 8760), giving a minimum 10x SLA Credit of £35.62 per hour.

The minimum SLA Credit you can claim is for one hour. The maximum SLA Credit you can claim is capped at 100% of your Monthly Plan Value.

3. How you will receive SLA Credits

In order to receive SLA Credits you must submit a request for SLA Credits using either our Support Ticket system or by emailing [email protected], no later than the end of Monthly Billing Period which follows the Monthly Billing Period in which we fail to meet our Uptime Guarantee.

SLA Credits shall be added to your Account and applied to future invoices. SLA Credits will not exceed the Monthly Plan Value for the month in which we failed to meet our Uptime Guarantee and will not be paid in cash. If you terminate your Account or Agreement before the SLA Credit is applied, you will not receive the SLA Credit.

4. When you will not receive an SLA Credit

Downtime caused by any of the following circumstances, as determined at our sole discretion, shall not be included in the Covered Downtime and shall not be eligible for SLA Credit:

  • Any maintenance performed during the Maintenance Period,
  • Emergency maintenance performed at any time,
  • Scheduled outages,
  • Force majeure events, including but not limited to, acts of nature (fire, flood, earthquake, storm, or other natural disaster), acts of war (invasion, hostilities, rebellion, revolution, insurrection, terrorist activities, and other hostile activities), actions taken by governments (sanction, blockage, embargo, and other governmental action), labour disputes (strike, lockout, or any similar dispute), failure of power sources, outages caused by external service providers, and any other event which we cannot reasonably anticipate, prevent, control, or avoid,
  • Traffic reaching a Website that exceeds the capabilities of the Website, or the Website’s Service Plan,
  • Client’s breach of the Terms of Service or any other policies, terms, or agreements applicable to the Client,
  • Client’s or individual users’ device being blocked to the whole or part of the Website due to the triggering of our security rules,
  • Client’s machine access problems,
  • Client authored, tweaked or installed code,
  • Third-party authored, tweaked or installed code that the Client gave permission to the third-party to,
  • Changes to the website or hosting-related settings by parties other than SonicWP.

For clarity, those websites on our Advanced Protection Programme, are covered for software/code-caused Downtime, as SonicWP takes full responsibility of the website’s codebase. Websites which are on our normal/default plan, whereby the client or their authorised representative is able to make code or system-wide changes, are not covered by software/code-caused Downtime.

5. Contact

Should you require to contact or write to us in relation to our policies, please email [email protected] or send us a letter at the address provided here.