Uptime SLA

Our commitment

This Uptime Service Level Agreement ("SLA") forms part of our Terms of Service. It's given by [Registered company name], which operates the VirtualCloud brand ("VirtualCloud", "we", "us" or "our"), to every customer with an active paid Service.

We commit to 99.99% monthly uptime of our network and infrastructure for every Service we sell: web, WordPress and reseller hosting, business email, VPS, dedicated servers, and DNS for domains that use our nameservers. The commitment applies in all six regions (Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Singapore, Frankfurt, London and New York) wherever the Service is offered.

"Network and infrastructure" means the parts of the Service that we build and run: power, cooling, the physical servers and storage, our hypervisors and hosting platform, and our network up to the point where it connects to the public internet. It doesn't cover the software you install or the way you configure it, which is explained under Exclusions.

Definitions

Service

One product on your account, such as a hosting plan, a mailbox plan, a VPS or a dedicated server, identified by its domain, hostname or server ID.

Downtime

A period in which the Service is unavailable, as described under What each product covers, because of a failure in our network or infrastructure.

Monthly uptime

The percentage of minutes in a calendar month (IST) in which the Service was not in Downtime.

Monthly fee

What you pay for the affected Service for one month, excluding GST, setup fees, domain fees and one-time charges. For a longer billing term, it's the term price divided by the number of months in the term.

Service credit

An amount added to your account balance and applied to future invoices. It can't be exchanged for cash.

Scheduled maintenance

Planned work announced at least 48 hours in advance on our status page and by email to affected customers.

Diagnosis

The moment one of our engineers confirms which hardware component of a dedicated server has failed.

What each product covers

In all of our data centre regions, a Service counts as available when the following works from outside our network. If it doesn't, because of a fault on our side, the time counts as Downtime.

SSL certificates aren't measured separately. A certificate installed on our hosting is covered as part of that hosting Service, but issuance and validation depend on the certificate authority, which is a third party.

How we measure uptime

Uptime is measured separately for each Service, over each calendar month, as (minutes in the month − Downtime minutes) ÷ minutes in the month × 100. A 30-day month has 43,200 minutes, so 99.99% allows 4.32 minutes of Downtime.

• When Downtime starts. At the earlier of the time our monitoring detects the outage and the time you report it in a ticket.
• When it ends. When the Service is available again, as confirmed by our monitoring.
• Rounding. Downtime is counted in whole minutes and rounded up in your favour.
• Several outages. All Downtime for a Service in the same month is added together and gives one monthly uptime figure.
• Records. Incidents are published on our status page. If your own monitoring shows something different from ours, send it with your claim and we'll review it in good faith.

Service credits

If a Service's monthly uptime falls below 99.99%, you're entitled to a credit worked out as a percentage of that Service's monthly fee:

• Cap. Credits for a Service are capped at 50% of its monthly fee for any one month, however many incidents there were.
• Per Service. Credit is based on the fee of the affected Service only, not on your whole account. If several Services were affected, each one is assessed separately.
• How it's paid. Credits are added to your account balance and used against your next invoices. They can't be paid out in cash, transferred to another account or carried over after your account is closed.

Worked examples

Hardware replacement and support

If a component of one of our dedicated servers fails, such as a drive, memory module, power supply, network card or motherboard, we replace it within 4 hours of diagnosis, in every region where we offer dedicated servers. The 4-hour target covers the hardware swap. It doesn't include rebuilding a RAID array, reinstalling an operating system or restoring your data, which depend on the size of your data and on your setup.

Downtime caused by failed hardware is our responsibility and counts towards your monthly uptime from the time it's detected or reported until the server is back online. On VPS, a failure of the host node is handled by moving your server to healthy hardware or restoring it there, and the time also counts as Downtime.

Our support desk answers tickets and email 24/7/365 in English and Hindi. On the free Standard tier, our first-response targets are 30 minutes for critical issues and 2 hours for standard ones. These are targets rather than credit-backed commitments. Paid support plans are described on the support page.

Scheduled maintenance

Planned work that may interrupt a Service is announced at least 48 hours in advance on our status page and by email to the customers it affects. Where we can, we schedule it outside business hours in the affected region. Scheduled maintenance announced this way doesn't count as Downtime.

Sometimes urgent work can't wait 48 hours, for example to fix a security vulnerability in our platform. Interruptions from emergency work done with less notice do count as Downtime, unless the work was needed because of one of the exclusions below.

Exclusions

Downtime doesn't include unavailability caused by:

• scheduled maintenance announced as described above;
• your actions or omissions, or those of anyone using your account, including code, plugins, configuration, firewall rules, operating-system changes or reboots you start;
• usage above your plan's resource limits, such as CPU, entry processes or inodes, or a breach of fair use;
• suspension under our Terms or Acceptable Use Policy, including for non-payment;
• denial-of-service or other attacks that exceed our mitigation capacity, and steps we take to protect the network, such as temporarily null-routing an IP address under attack;
• events beyond our reasonable control, as described in the Terms;
• third-party services, including domain registries, certificate authorities, software licence vendors, payment gateways, and networks outside ours, such as your internet provider;
• features marked beta or preview, free services, and backups and restores, which have their own schedules rather than an uptime figure.

How to claim a credit

1. Open a ticket from your client area or the contact page, or email billing@virtualcloud.in, within 30 days of the end of the month in which the Downtime happened.
2. Tell us what was affected: the account email, each affected Service (domain, hostname or server ID) and the dates and times of the Downtime in IST.
3. Add evidence if you have it, such as alerts from your own monitoring, screenshots or traceroutes. It helps, but it isn't required.
4. We check the claim against our monitoring and incident records and reply within 5 business days with the uptime figure and the credit we've worked out.
5. Approved credit is added to your account balance and applied to your next invoice.

Claims made after the 30-day window, or for a period in which the Service was suspended, aren't eligible.

Credits as your remedy

Service credits are your sole and exclusive remedy for Downtime covered by this SLA, as the Terms explain, and they count towards our liability limit there. Nothing in this SLA limits rights you have under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 that the law doesn't allow us to exclude, or your right to cancel a Service as the Refund & cancellation policy describes.

Changes to this SLA

We may update this SLA. The current version is always on this page with its "Last updated" date. If a change reduces the uptime commitment or the credits available, we'll email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and the old terms continue to apply until then.

Contact us

Credit claims and billing questions: billing@virtualcloud.in. Technical problems: open a ticket through the contact page, available 24/7. Questions about this SLA: legal@virtualcloud.in, or by post to [Registered company name], [Registered office address], India.

If you're not satisfied with how a claim was handled, you can write to our Grievance Officer.