1. Coverage and Terminology 

   This Service Level Agreement (SLA) applies to the customer or party or parties (“You”, “Your” ) who hold a current account with any of the Web Hosting (the “Services” ) services from The Web Hosting Machine (a registered trading name of Dolphin Software Pty L) (“The Web Hosting Machine”) and your account is current (i.e., not past due) with The Web Hosting Machine.As used herein, the term “Web Site Availability” means the percentage of a particular month (based on 24-hour days for the number of days in the subject month) that the content of customer’s Web site is available for access by third parties via HTTP and/or HTTPS, as measured by The Web Hosting Machine.

2. Technical Support

   The Web Hosting Machine will provide You with technical support for setup of your hosting account at no additional charge. Additional support will be charged. The Web Hosting Machine will not provide development-related support for web applications, scripts or components from third parties, scripts of installable applications from our Application Vault, or those developed by You.

Business Hours:

• Ticket Support is available Monday to Friday from 9:00am to 5:00pm ACST [Excluding Public Holidays].
• Phone Support is available Monday to Friday from 9:00am to 5:00pm ACST [Excluding Public Holidays].
• The Web Hosting Machine’s target response time to technical support requests is less than one hour. The response time depends on the complexity of the enquiry and current support request volumes.
  Critical and non-critical issues for all customers are charged at $140 ex GST per hour in quarter-hour blocks.

Out of Business Hours:

• Ticket Support: Tickets can be submitted and will be actioned next business day.
• Phone Support: The Web Hosting Machine has on call technicians to respond to critical issues. Non-critical issues should be lodged by ticket and will be actioned next business day.
• Critical Issues will be charged at $180 ex GST per hour in quarter-hour blocks unless it is a The Web Hosting Machine fault.
• Non-critical issues will be charged at $140 ex GST per hour in quarter-hour blocks.

3. Service Level

   1. Objective: 
      The Web Hosting Machine aims to achieve 100% Web Site Availability for all customers.
   2. Remedy:
      Except under the conditions mentioned in the next section below, if the Web Site Availability of customer’s Web site is less than 100%, The Web Hosting Machine will issue a credit to You according to the following table:
   3. The credit will be calculated based on the monthly service charge for the affected Services.

4. Maintenance Procedure

   1. The Web Hosting Machine will do its best to announce any scheduled maintenance at least 24 hours ahead of time to the customer.
   2. The Web Hosting Machine reserves the right to perform emergency maintenance without any prior notification, should it be deemed necessary to protect and maintain the security and integrity of the Service.

5. Conditions 

   Customer shall not receive any credits under this SLA in connection with any failure or deficiency of Web Site Availability caused by or associated with:

   1. circumstances beyond The Web Hosting Machine Hosting’s reasonable control, including, without limitation, acts of any governmental body, war, insurrection, sabotage, armed conflict, embargo, fire, flood, strike or other labor disturbance, interruption of or delay in transportation, unavailability of or interruption or delay in telecommunications or third party services, virus attacks or hackers, failure of third party software (including, without limitation, ecommerce software, payment gateways, chat, statistics or free scripts) or inability to obtain raw materials, supplies, or power used in or equipment needed for provision of this SLA;
   2. failure of access circuits to the The Web Hosting Machine’s Network or it’s upstream providers, unless such failure is caused solely by The Web Hosting Machine;
   3. scheduled maintenance and emergency maintenance and upgrades;
   4. DNS issues outside the direct control of The Web Hosting Machine;
   5. issues with FTP, POP, IMAP, or SMTP customer access;
   6. false SLA breaches reported as a result of outages or errors of any The Web Hosting Machine’s measurement system;
   7. customer’s acts or omissions (or acts or omissions of others engaged or authorized by customer), including, without limitation, custom scripting or coding (e.g., CGI, Perl, HTML, ASP, etc), any negligence, willful misconduct, or use of the Services in breach of The Web Hosting Machine’s Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy;
   8. e-mail or webmail delivery and transmission;
   9. DNS (Domain Name Server) Propagation.
   10. outages elsewhere on the Internet that hinder access to your account. The Web Hosting Machine is not responsible for browser or DNS caching that may make your site appear inaccessible when others can still access it. The Web Hosting Machine will guarantee only those areas considered under the control of The Web Hosting Machine : The Web Hosting Machine server links to the Internet, and The Web Hosting Machine’s servers.
   11. Please note: Server downtime is not recorded and no credit is issued during scheduled or emergency system maintenance. Outages caused by the actions beyond The Web Hosting Machine’s control including, but not limited to DoS attacks or other forms of intrusion are excluded from the uptime/downtime calculations.
   12. To guarantee optimal performance of the hosting infrastructure, it is necessary for The Web Hosting Machine to perform routine maintenance on the servers. Such maintenance often requires taking The Web Hosting Machine web and email servers off-line, typically performed during off-peak hours. The Web Hosting Machine will give you advance notice of maintenance requiring the servers to be taken off-line whenever possible. The Web Hosting Machine reserves one hour of Service unavailability per month for maintenance purposes. Such unavailability is not included in the Service Availability calculation.

6. Credit Request and Payment Procedures 

   To receive a refund based upon SLA performance, send an email or written refund request to the Accounts department. You must provide your Account ID and all dates and times of server or network unavailability.REFUND REQUESTS MUST BE RECEIVED BY THE ACCOUNTS DEPARTMENT WITHIN THIRTY DAYS OF THE END OF THE MONTH FOR WHICH YOU ARE REQUESTING A REFUND.If the unavailability is confirmed by The Web Hosting Machine, credits will be applied within two billing cycles after The Web Hosting Machine’s receipt of customer’s credit request. Credits are not refundable and can be used only towards future billing charges.Notwithstanding anything to the contrary herein, the total amount credited to customer in a particular month under this SLA shall not exceed the total hosting fee paid by customer for such month for the affected Services. Credits are exclusive of any applicable taxes charged to customer or collected by The Web Hosting Machine and are customer’s sole and exclusive remedy with respect to any failure or deficiency in the Web Site Availability of customer’s Web site.

Note: Credits are not refundable and can be used only towards future billing charges

Last updated: 14/02/2014