Service Level Agreement

VIRTBIZ, as a provider of hosting and colocation services, strives for 100% reliability. Of course, in the real world and despite best efforts, failure does occasionally occur. This Service Level Agreement (SLA) outlines our guarantee of service availability, procedure for determining failure, and remedy to you, our customer, in the event of an outage.

This SLA applies separately to each account using VIRTBIZ services. Unless otherwise provided herein, this SLA is subject to the terms of the VIRTBIZ Network Service Agreement and capitalized terms will have the meaning specified in the VIRTBIZ Network Service Agreement. We reserve the right to change the terms of this SLA in accordance with the VIRTBIZ Network Service Agreement.

SERVICE CREDITS

Service credits are calculated as a percentage of the total charges paid by a VIRTBIZ customer (excluding one-time payments such as setup charges) for any service that has been verified as unavailable. If a VIRTBIZ customer subscribes to multiple services, service credit will only be issued for those services verified as unavailable and will not be applied to non-impacted services. Service credits will be issued on the next invoice that has not already been generated and applied against future payments otherwise due from a VIRTBIZ customer and are not offered as any form of cash payment or refund against current or prior invoices.

NETWORK SLA and VIRTBIZ COMMITMENT

VIRTBIZ guarantees at least 99.95% network availability (uptime) as measured during a monthly billing cycle to services provided to a VIRTBIZ client in good standing and uses commercially reasonable efforts to achieve and monitor service availability. If VIRTBIZ fails to meet this commitment, an affected customer may be eligible to receive a service credit as described below.

Monthly Uptime Percentage Credit Percentage
Less than 99.95% but equal to or greater than 99.0% 10%
Less than 99.0% 30%
  • Network uptime is determined by the availability of the VIRTBIZ core network (ie: border routers, edge routers, customer switching routers) to an independent network of 9 worldwide monitoring stations. Monitoring is performed by individual stations in a round-robin manner.
  • If any single station detects an error, the next station in line will check and the combined results are cross-checked by a 3rd station. In this manner, all reported incidents are confirmed by at least 2 stations.
  • Aggregated network uptime is displayed on our website under Network Tools and accessible by customers at all times.

POWER SLA and VIRTBIZ COMMITMENT (applies only to Colocation customers)

VIRTBIZ guarantees 100% electrical power availability (uptime) to dedicated electrical circuit customers and at least 99.95% electrical power availability (uptime) as measured during a monthly billing cycle to non-dedicated (shared) electrical circuit customers. In all cases, VIRTBIZ will ensure availability using technologies that may include redundant utility services, UPS, and emergency generator.

Monthly Uptime Percentage Credit Percentage
(Dedicated)
Credit Percentage
(Non-Dedicated)
Less than 100% but equal or greater to 99.95% 10% N/A
Less than 99.95% but equal to or greater than 99.0% 25% 10%
Less than 99.0% 40% 30%
  • Dedicated electrical circuit refers to any electrical circuit between the customer equipment and the next upstream distribution center or circuit breaker panel that is provided for the sole use of a single customer and is not shared with any other customer.
  • Unless specifically provided elsewhere by the VIRTBIZ Network Service Agreement or accompanying document the receipt of a service credit equal to the applicable credit percentage shall be the sole and exclusive remedy in the event of a confirmed period of downtime.

CREDIT REQUEST and ELIGIBILITY PROCEDURES

Credit requests are typically processed within 30 days of receipt.  In order to be eligible for credit, a customer request must be made via Support Ticket submitted to our customer support portal at https://www.virtbiz.com/support within 30 days after the incident for which credit is requested has occurred. Late requests, incomplete requests or requests made by other means may not be considered or honored.

In all cases, VIRTBIZ retains sole discretionary power when determining if a guarantee has not been met. If availability is impacted by factors other than those used in our Monthly Uptime Percentage calculation, then we may issue a Service Credit considering such factors at our discretion.

SLA EXCLUSIONS

VIRTBIZ will make SLA service credit available in connection with eligible incidents. Customers shall not receive credits under this SLA in connection with any failure or unavailability caused by or associated with:

  • Suspension of service due to AUP violations or non-payment;
  • Scheduled Maintenance and Emergency Maintenance periods;
  • Failure of bandwidth providers or access circuits outside VIRTBIZ control;
  • Customer-provided equipment including but not limited to network interface equipment, server, disk-array, power supply, PDU/power strip or surge protector;
  • False SLA breaches reported as a result of outages or errors of any measurement system;
  • DNS issues outside the direct control of VIRTBIZ;
  • Circumstances beyond the reasonable control of VIRTBIZ, including, without limitation, reasons of Force Majeure, 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;

MAINTENANCE WINDOWS

Maintenance windows may be required from time to time in order to ensure ongoing reliability of hosted assets.

Scheduled Maintenance shall mean any maintenance of which customer is notified 48 hours in advance and is performed during an announced maintenance window. Notice of Scheduled Maintenance will be provided to customer’s designated point of contact by email. It is the customer’s responsibility to ensure an up-to-date contact list within our Customer Portal.  Emergency Maintenance may be performed at any time in order to ensure the ongoing safe and reliable operations of the network or datacenter infrastructure and best effort will be made to notify customers within a reasonable timeframe although no prior notice can be guaranteed.

CHANGES and LIMITATIONS

This SLA is subject to change at the sole discretion of VIRTBIZ, without notice to customer. The most recent revision of this document will be posted to this web site. All changes made to the SLA will be effective five (5) days after the first publishing date.

This SLA in no way construes that VIRTBIZ will guarantee performance against application specific failures such as web server software, operating system software, failing hardware, database performance or related components.  VIRTBIZ maintains sole discretion to determine fault and identify any failure to perform under the obligations of this SLA.