HOSTING SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT

Atech Consulting guarantees 100% up-time for all sites on our Cloud Based Hosting plans. For each hour (or fraction thereof) you experience a compensable outage, we will compensate you 1 day of hosting costs. Scheduled maintenance is not included in the monthly up-time calculation.

NETWORK UPTIME SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT – FOR ALL SERVICES

Atech Consulting guarantees network uptime to be 100%. This guarantee assures that all major routing devices within our network are reachable from the global internet 100% of the time.

NETWORK SLA EXCLUSIONS 

Many possible situations are completely beyond the control of Atech Consulting, and therefore are not in the scope of this SLA. These situations include:

• Scheduled Network Maintenance – occasionally network maintenance will be required. Atech Consulting will do everything possible to minimize and avoid downtime during this maintenance. You will receive prior notification of upcoming maintenance at the e-mail address we have on file. Scheduled maintenance periods are not eligible for SLA credits.
• Hardware Maintenance – on rare occasions, the hardware in your Dedicated Server may need maintenance or replacement. Atech Consulting will do everything possible to minimize any downtime in these situations per our hardware replacement SLA. Any downtime incurred as a result of this maintenance will not be counted towards our network SLA.
• Software Maintenance – an important part of managing a Dedicated Server is keeping the software up to date. If you choose to have Atech Consulting manage your server, occasional software updates will be required to address security or performance issues. Usually you will experience little or no downtime in these situations, but we cannot guarantee a specific amount of time in all situations.
• Malicious Attacks – if a third party not associated with Atech Consulting initiates a “Denial of Service” or other form of disabling attack against your Dedicated Server or major portions of our network, Atech Consulting will do everything in its power to stop the attack, but cannot guarantee a resolution time.
• Legal Actions – In the case that a legal action is taken against a client of Atech Consulting and Atech Consulting is required to act in accordance with the order, Atech Consulting shall not be responsible for any SLA damages.
• cPanel Issues – if you choose to run cPanel and Web Host Manager on your Dedicated Server, the default install will be configured for automatic updates of cPanel related software. On occasion, one of these automatic updates could adversely affect all or part of the cPanel related software on your server. Atech Consulting will do whatever is necessary to fix any cPanel related problems, but cannot guarantee a resolution time.

NETWORK SLA REMEDY – FOR ALL SERVICES

In the event that Atech Consulting does not meet this SLA, Dedicated Hosting clients will become eligible to request compensation for downtime reported by service monitoring logs.

The amount of compensation may not exceed the customer’s monthly recurring charge. This SLA does not apply for any month that the customer has been in breach of Atech Consulting Terms of Service or if the account is in default of payment.

RESPONSE TIME SLA’s – FOR ALL SERVICES

Atech Consulting’s fully-managed customers are covered by two types of initial response time guarantees:

• Help Desk Initial Response Time Guarantee
• Phone Answer Time Guarantee

THE HELP DESK INITIAL RESPONSE TIME GUARANTEE (2 HOURS) – FOR ALL SERVICES

That means that when you submit a trouble ticket via our help desk system you are guaranteed a response from a support technician within 2 hours. If Atech Consulting fails to respond within 2 hours, you will be legible for compensation, credited 10 times the amount of time exceeding our SLA commitment. That means that if your ticket goes 1 hour past our stated initial response time guarantee, your account will receive a 10 hour hosting credit.

PHONE ANSWER TIME GUARANTEE (59 SECONDS) – FOR ALL SERVICES

We guarantee that a live support agent will answer your phone call within 59 seconds from the time you select the department you wish to speak with. If Atech Consulting fails to respond within fifty nine (59) seconds, you will be credited 10 times the amount of time exceeding our SLA commitment. That means that if your phone call goes 6 minutes past our stated initial response time guarantee, your account will receive a 1 hour hosting credit.

COMPENSATION

All requests for compensation must be received within 5 business days of the incident in question. The amount of compensation may not exceed the customer’s monthly recurring charge. This SLA does not apply for any month that the customer has been in breach of Atech Consulting Terms of Service or if the account is in default of payment. Duplication of SLA compensation is not allowed. Only one SLA credit may be given per incident. For example: if a network outage SLA event and a phone SLA event happen simultaneously. SLA compensation will only be given for one of the events.

Atech Consulting utilizes some third party services to provide responses to customers. These include, but are not limited to, our LiveChat system. If a third party system’s failure prevents Atech Consulting from honoring the Response Time SLA requirements the SLA event will be ineligible for compensation.

WEBSITE MAINTENANCE SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT

UP-TIME AND DOWNTIME

• We guarantee 100% up-time for all sites on our Cloud Based Hosting plans. For each hour (or fraction thereof) you experience a compensable outage, we will compensate you 1 day of hosting costs. Scheduled maintenance is not included in the monthly up-time calculation.
• For websites unable to leverage our Cloud Based Hosting plans and are hosted by another hosted provider, we guarantee 99.9% up-time, calculated at the end of each month. For each hour (or fraction thereof) of outage beyond 0.1% downtime, we will compensate the impacted customer for 1 day of hosting costs.
• Scheduled maintenance outages and outages during our standard maintenance window of 12AM – 2AM GMT +3 will not be included in the monthly up-time calculation and outages within this window are not compensable.
• Our automation monitors all hosting infrastructure and their hosted websites. If our monitoring solution discovers a website or infrastructure component is not functioning, our 24/7 support staff will be alerted and will begin working on the problem regardless of whether a customer has an open ticket.
• We consider a compensable outage to have begun at the time our monitoring system sends an outage alert email to our support staff, or the customer opens an incident ticket reporting the problem. The incident must also be verified by us to ensure the website is completely unresponsive to requests and is not a localized issue to a specific network, web browser, or system.
• If your site serves a specific critical function that you would like to be monitored 24/7, our custom monitoring solutions are available. Custom monitoring for your website will mean that specific pages are tested using simulated user input and the website’s response is checked against an expected value. If this value is not as expected, our support staff will be called out. Custom monitoring is available at a surcharge or included in some plans.

WEBSITE MAINTENANCE

• Atech Hosting (Standard): Thanks to our innovative architecture that many of our customers enjoy, maintenance such as server or WordPress updates can be done at no impact to your users. On the extremely rare occasion we need to schedule downtime for maintenance or to significantly revise our hosting architecture running your website, we will notify you of the work to be done and the window will be done in at least 7 days before the work occurs.
• Single-Server Solution: Due to specific technical requirements, your website may need to run on single-server or dedicated server architecture. For these websites that are not able to leverage our distributed no-impact architecture, users may notice brief service interruptions (usually around 15 seconds if there is an update to apply) while WordPress and server updates are applied during our maintenance window between 12AM and 2AM GMT +3. If scheduled maintenance is required outside of this time frame, we will notify you at least 7 days before this work occurs.

WEBSITE BACKUPS

• Every night shortly after 1AM GMT +3, your website and database will be backed up and stored in multiple locations off of the web server.
• If any technical issue happens or something accidentally gets deleted, we will be able to restore your site to working order from a backup taken between 1AM and 3AM GMT +3 that day.
• Backups are kept for 30 days, so if something is accidentally deleted and is not noticed until after 30 days, we will unfortunately not be able to help restore this data.
• Extending backups to more than 30 days is available for all sites at an additional surcharge. Please contact us if you would like to extend the lifespan of your backups beyond our 30-day default period.

WORDPRESS UPDATES

WordPress Core: Atech Consulting will perform all updates for WordPress core on a daily basis. This ensures that critical security issues will be fixed the same day WordPress makes the update available! Significant updates that don’t necessarily patch critical security issues are reviewed by our team on our internal sites before being deployed to your site.

WordPress Themes and Plugins: We leverage our innovative 3-environment architecture extensively for theme and plugin updates to help ensure unstable updates are caught before they make it to your public website. Our standard update procedure for themes and plugins is a weekly process that operates as follows:

• Plugin/Theme Update Day 1 – Your development environment is updated to the latest available levels for installed themes and plugins.
• Plugin/Theme Update Day 2 – Your production environment is copied to your testing environment and is then updated to the same version levels as your development environment.
• Plugin/Theme Update Day 3 – If no errors have been detected by our testing or raised by our customers, the production sites are updated to the same versions of themes and plugins as the testing and development environments.

If there is a critical security issue found in a plugin or theme in use on your website, we will update that plugin/theme the same day we hear about the vulnerability and will leverage our above approach in a compressed timeline to begin and end within 24 hours of being advised of the issue.

What If an Update Breaks My Site? We have taken great care in designing and testing our update process to ensure that any instability is caught as early as possible.

• We take a backup of your site immediately before it’s updated as well as test it before and after the update.
• If any update breaks your site, our automated testing and recovery process will restore your site to the backup that was taken immediately prior to the update, so you won’t wake up to find your site offline.
• Our staff will receive an alert for your site’s failed update and will notify you of the root cause and the next actions to take to ensure your site stays up to date and secure on the internet.

WEBSITE SECURITY

• Securing a website on the internet is not a job that can ever be complete. Technology is always changing and with that, come new ways to exploit it. Our architecture and systems security controls have not only been designed by CISSP-certified security staff, but are frequently being reviewed and tested by CISSP-certified security staff as well.
• We also supplement our internal expertise with the global WordPress security expertise of the staff at WordFence by deploying the WordFence plugin to all of our sites for enhanced monitoring and protection.
• In the event of a security issue and your site somehow becomes infected, we can restore your site to an automated backup from earlier that same day.
• We can also blacklist IP ranges and tune caching to respond to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and ensure that your users can still access the information they need while our infrastructure responds and adapts to an in-progress attack.
• Traffic for all sites hosted by Atech Consulting is secured with strong SSL encryption. We will automatically setup, maintain, and renew certificates for your sites to help prevent your users falling victim to data snooping and man-in-the-middle attacks.

WEBSITE EMAIL SERVICE

• Emails from your website are routed through a highly reputable mail server instead of being sent directly from our web servers to help ensure your websites’ emails don’t get flagged as spam.
• We have developed automation to test all contact forms on supported sites daily to ensure that the information entered into your contact form gets from your website, through our outgoing mail server, and into an external testing mailbox.
• If contact forms are mission critical for your business and you want to receive a test email every day into your inbox without having to fill out your contact form, let us know and we can set this service up for you at a surcharge.
• If a failure to send email from your site is detected, you will be notified and we will work with you to resolve this issue for your site.

TECHNICAL SUPPORT

• Atech Consulting will provide free technical support for issues related to functionality or features of our services. Our technical support is available for all clients and is provided on an as-is, as available basis.
• All technical support requests must be sent via email to support[at]atech-consulting.co.ke, or directly to your account manager via email or a phone call.
• If you request technical support, you understand and agree that any modifications we perform in order to address your technical support issue may affect the functionality of your website and/or services.
• If your request for technical support exceeds 1 hour of troubleshooting time, or is considered outside of scope, we reserve the right to charge additional fees for further support or alternatively deny support for your issue.
• We may refuse any request requiring changes that would negatively impact or not be related to our ability to deliver our services.
• The following issues are examples of issues that we consider inside the scope of our technical support services:
  • Issues created by WordPress updates including themes and plugins.
  • DNS administration and HTTP response errors.
  • SSL certificate issues and caching issues.
  • Restoring a backup from a previous day.
  • Server configuration and performance issues.

• The following issues are examples of issues that we consider outside the scope of our technical support services:

• • Installation of third-party scripts/applications.
  • Issues related to customization and coding not developed by us.
  • Web design and web development services.
  • SEO or analytics services.
  • New plugin installation and setup.
  • Issues isolated to particular networks or systems that cannot be reproduced in other environments.
• Some of our website maintenance and hosting plans may include specified hours of web design and development hours which would be applicable to subscribers of those services only.
• If you request technical support for issues we consider outside the scope of our technical support services, we may provide you with assistance at our own discretion, subject to availability and additional fees. We will inform you, and receive your consent, prior to charging you for technical support.
• Fees for technical support that we consider out of scope or that exceeds 1 hour of troubleshooting time must be paid in advance.
• If the total time of your combined requests for technical support, in one month, exceeds 5 hours, we reserve the right to charge additional fees or deny support for your issue.