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Support Contracts and Hosting SLAs

Support Contracts Service Level Agreement

SLA Response times for contracted customers

  • Standard Support Contracts - support is provided during normal weekday office hours, between 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, excluding bank holidays.
    • Non-urgent support requests - respond within 5 working hours (during your contracted times)
    • Urgent and critical support requests (i.e. website totally unavailable or hacked) - respond within 2 working hours (during your contracted times)
  • Enhanced Support Contracts - support is provided during normal weekday, between 8am to 9pm, Monday to Friday, excluding bank holidays.
    • Non-urgent support requests - respond within 3 working hours (during your contracted times)
    • Urgent and critical support requests (i.e. website totally unavailable or hacked) - respond within 1 working hours (during your contracted times)
  • Out of hours Support Contracts - support is provided between 7am and 00:00, 7 days a week, excluding bank holidays
    • Non-urgent support requests - respond within 3 working hours (during your contracted times)
    • Urgent and critical support requests (i.e. website totally unavailable or hacked) - respond within 2 working hours (during your contracted times)
  • 24/7 Enhanced Support Contracts - support is provided 24 hours a day/365 days per year
    • Non-urgent support requests - respond within 2 working hours (during your contracted times)
    • Urgent and critical support requests (i.e. website totally unavailable or hacked) - respond within 30 working minutes (during your contracted times)

    Unless otherwise specified, all contracts run for a minimum of 12 months and auto-renew.

    Contract hours may be increased during the contract period, but not reduced.

    Non-Support Contract Requests

    Critical requests from development and hosting customers without a support contract or a block of support hours will be addressed at the following rates:

    • Non-support contract support rate: £85.00 per hour, minimum 2 hours. Payment required on instruction.
    • Out of hours emergency support for non-support contract customer rate: £150.00 per hour (min charge of 2 hours). Payment required on instruction.

    We do not provide SLA response times for customers without a support contract. For customers who have purchased blocks of support hours, we aim to begin work within 5 working days.

    Managed Hosting Service Level Agreement

    • UK Server location - unless otherwise agreed the location of our servers are in the UK.
    • Our Datacentres are ISO 27001 Certified. Our servers are located in a top-spec datacentre in the Midlands and London UK. Featuring 24/7 on-site technical staff and fully redundant UPS, generator and cooling systems.
    • Cyber Essentials Certification is available for our Level 3 VPSs
    • cPanel-Certified Support - our server support have undertaken official cPanel training and are cPanel-certified.
    • Server Firewall and DDoS Protection 
    • Imunify360 WAF including realtime file scanning
    • Daily server backups to two off-site locations (UK and Germany)
    • 24/7/365 Monitoring and pro-active server support
    • Uptime monitoring
    • We provide free SSL Certificates
    • We will secure and configure your Joomla website
    • We install, configure, manage and monitor Admin Tools Pro WAF
    • Configure and manage Joomla user access control
    • Install Joomla maintenace and security updates
    • Install (specified) Joomla extension maintenance and security updates
    • We will install low and moderate level security updates within 48 hours
    • We will install critical security updates within 12 hours
    • Weekly website security audit
    • In addition to server backups, we take a minimum of one daily off-site backups of website and website database, which are stored in the Netherlands.
    • If you website is compromised we will restore your website from a clean backup (Level 1 & Level 2 hosting)
    • If your website is compromised we will rebuild your website (Level 3 hosting)

    In the event of a Data Breach or Attack

    Security Incident and Data Breach Response

    Incident Detection and Reporting
    We shall monitor the hosting environment for security incidents.
    In the event of a confirmed or suspected data breach, we shall:

    • Within 4 hours of detection (for confirmed breaches) or 24 hours (for suspected breaches).

    • Provide an initial incident report including known details of the breach, affected systems, and mitigation steps taken.

    Containment and Mitigation
    Upon detection, we shall immediately:

    • Isolate affected systems to prevent further unauthorised access.

    • Begin restoration from the most recent secure backup, if necessary.

    • Apply required patches or configuration changes to prevent recurrence.

    Investigation and Reporting
    A full incident report shall be provided within 5 business days, including:

    • Root cause analysis.

    • Scope of data affected.

    • Steps taken to resolve and prevent future occurrences.

    • Evidence of compliance with applicable data protection regulations (e.g., GDPR).

    Client Responsibilities
    The Client agrees to:

    • Maintain up-to-date user access controls and passwords.

    • Promptly report any suspicious activity or compromised credentials.

    • Cooperate with us during investigation and recovery.

    Hosting Service Level Agreement

    Severity LevelResponse Stages and Times
    Severity Level:

    Critical

    1. Business Critical Failures: a problem that materially impacts the client’s business operations.

      Examples include:

      • Any of the client’s servers going offline
      • The client’s service being inaccessible
      • Any server failure that results in a client not being able to carry out typical tasks on the client’s service
    Response Stages and Times:
    1. Acknowledgement of receipt of support request within 30 minutes, measured from the first of (a) when infrastructure monitors alert Sarah Hayes' engineers, or (b) a critical-priority technical support ticket is created by the client to report a service problem.
    2. Provide frequent updates, usually every 2 hours, until full restoration of service.
    3. Sarah Hayes shall work on the problem continuously and exercise commercially reasonable efforts until full restoration of service.
    Severity Level:

    High

    Defect with workaround

    • a critical error in service for which a workaround exists; or
    • a non-critical error that affects the operations of the client’s business or marketability of its service or product.
    Response Stages and Times:
    1. Acknowledgment of receipt of support request within 60 minutes, measured from the first of (a) when infrastructure monitors alert Sarah Hayes' engineers, or (b) a high-priority technical support ticket is created by the client to report a service problem.
    2. Provide frequent updates, usually every 3-4 hours, measured from the time of the last response to a support request, until full restoration of service.
    3. Sarah Hayes shall exercise commercially reasonable efforts until full restoration of service.
    Severity Level:

    Normal

    Minor Error: an isolated or minor error that:

    • does not significantly affect business operations
    • may disable only certail non-essential functions; or
    • does not materially impact the client's business performance
    • normal support requests are handled between 8am and 10pm
    Response Stages and Times:
    1. Acknowledgment of receipt of support request within 3 hours, measured from the first of (a) when infrastructure monitors alert Sarah Hayes' engineers, or (b) a normal-priority technical support ticket is created by the client to report a service problem.
    2. Sarah Hayes shall aim to provide a permanent fault correction within 2 Business Days after the acknowledgment of the support request has elapsed. If the fault is outside of our control, we will raise a support request with the relevant software or hardware provider.

    Service Credits

     
    1. If availability falls below the Uptime Service Level in a given calendar month (Service Delivery Failure), Sarah Hayes shall provide Service Credits at a rate of 5% of the total monthly Hosting Fee (which shall be one twelfth of the annual Hosting Fee) for every 60 minutes of Service Delivery Failure evidenced by the Client.
    2. If Sarah Hayes fails to achieve a relevant Support Response Time (Service Delivery Failure), Sarah Hayes shall provide Service Credits at a rate of 5% of the total monthly Hosting Fee (which shall be one twelfth of the annual Hosting Fee) for every failure to achieve the relevant Support Response Time.
    3. The maximum Service Credit allowable in respect of a given month is limited to 100% of the total monthly Hosting Fee payable for the month in which the Service Delivery Failure occurred.
    4. Service Credits shall be calculated by Sarah Hayes and placed on account, without expiry, for use against future service invoices.
    5. The Client must notify Sarah Hayes within 7 days of a failure to meet either the Uptime Service Level or Support Response Time to claim service credits.
    6. The Client acknowledges and agrees that the terms of this agreement relating to Service Credits do not operate by way of penalty and constitute a genuine attempt to pre-estimate loss.
    7. The provision of a Service Credit shall be an exclusive remedy for a particular Service Delivery Failure.
    8. Service Credits shall be shown as a credit held on account and deducted from the amount due from the Client to Sarah Hayes on the next invoice issued. Sarh Hayes shall not in any circumstances be obliged to pay any money or make any refund to the Client.
    9. Credits may not be issued if the Client’s account is past due, suspended, or pending suspension, nor will Credits be issued in cases where the Client is in breach of our Terms and Conditions of Service or Acceptable Use Policy or incidents which are beyond our reasonable control.