Ensuring Our Best Service to You
Last Updated: 30/10/21
Service Level Agreement – Hipposerve Digital Services Ltd. trading as Hipposerve (“Hipposerve”) strives to offer you (“Customer”) excellent service, By this Service Level Agreement (“SLA”), Hipposerve guarantees to Customer that its Hosted Services will be available 99.9% of the time during any calendar month, subject to the terms and as set forth in this SLA (the “Uptime Guarantee”).
1. Covered Services.
The following services are not included in this SLA:
Hippo Pro Email, Mail Archiving, Website Management, Online Backup services, Hippo VPS Hosting, and Hippo Dedicated Servers.
Hipposerve Digital Services Limited provides the Uptime Guarantee in this SLA for its Hippo Hosting, Hosted Services, calculated on a monthly basis, provided Customer (i) is in good standing with Hipposerve Digital Services Limited (i.e., is not in arrears in payments, and has not otherwise breached any of its obligations to Hipposerve Digital Services Limited), and (ii) requests the Hosted Service Credit (as defined below) from Hipposerve Digital Services Limited for its noncompliance with the Uptime Guarantee in writing within 30 days of the end of the month in which such noncompliance occurred.
2. Exclusions.
Downtime caused by any of the events noted below will be excluded from the Hosted Service and the service level agreement availability calculations (“Excused Outages”):
(i) Customer environment issues affecting connectivity or interfering with the Hosted Services, including without limitation, Customer’s connection to the Internet (i.e., problems with the Customer’s Internet Service Provider, modem, cable, xDSL or dial-up connection or other Customer Internet connectivity issues) or any other Customer software or equipment, Customer’s firewall software, hardware or security settings, Customer’s configuration of anti-virus software or anti-spyware or malware software, or operator error of Customer;
(ii) third party attacks, including without limitation, hacks, intrusions, distributed denial-of-service attacks or any other third party actions intended to cause harm to or disrupt the Hosted Services, the Hipposerve Website or Hipposerve’s or its partners’ servers;
(iii) verified bugs of any third party software used in conjunction with the Hosted Services (including Microsoft software);
(iv) force majeure events, including, without limitation fire, flood, earthquake, elements of nature or acts of God; third party labour disruptions, acts of war, terrorism, riots, civil disorders, rebellions or revolutions; quarantines, embargoes and other similar governmental action; or any other similar cause beyond the reasonable control of Hipposerve;
(v) issues related to third party domain name system (DNS) errors or failures;
(vi) scheduled maintenance of the Hosted Services, conducted on a regular basis, of which Hipposerve will give Customer a minimum of 24hrs advanced notice by email or notification posted to the Hipposerve Control Panel; and
(vii) emergency maintenance of the Hosted Services, not to exceed 4 hours in any month, for which Customer may not receive advanced notice.
3. Non Compliance.
In the event Hipposerve Digital Services Limited fails to meet the Uptime Guarantee regarding one or more of its Hosted Services (the “Affected Service(s)”), as verified by Hipposerve based on its monitoring logs (a “Service Outage”), Customer will be entitled to a credit for future Hosted Services of the same type as the Affected Services ( “Hosted Service Credits”).
4. Hosted Service Credit Calculation.
For each full 1% of downtime, of verified Service Outage in any calendar month (based on a 30-day month calculation), excluding downtime caused by a Scheduled Outage (an “Outage Incident”), Customer will receive a Hosted Service Credit equal to 5% of the monthly subscription fees paid by the Customer for the users impacted by the Affected Service. Should a Service Outage span more than one month, the calculation of Hosted Service Credits starts over at the beginning of each month.
5. Hosted Service Credits Payment.
Hosted Service Credits will be issued in the form of a credit towards Customer’s next invoice, unless the affected month is Customer’s last month of subscription to the Affected Services, in which case the value of the Hosted Service Credits, as calculated herein, will be issued to Customer by Hipposerve Digital Services Limited within 60 calendar days from the end of the Customer’s last month of subscription to the Hosted Services.
6. Total Credit Limits.
Hosted Service Credits will apply only to a Customer’s users directly affected by a Service Outage, and Hosted Service Credits may not exceed 100% of the total subscription fees of the Affected Services, excluding applicable taxes. Hosted Service Credits will not be issued for any fraction of an Outage Incident and will not accrue or carry over from month to month. Notwithstanding anything set forth in this SLA, the Hosting Service Credit described herein shall be the sole and exclusive remedy of the Customer in connection with any outages, unavailability or breach by Hipposerve Digital Services Limited of this SLA.
7. Support Terms and Conditions.
Our customer support service is designed to provide support and assistance to our existing customers with the use of products purchased. We will also offer support and advice for services hosted on our products. In addition, our support team will provide support an assistance due to the failure of any of our products.
Support is available:
From 08:30 – 17:30 via telephone or web chat if available.
24/7 – via our support portal at help.hipposerve.co.uk
24/7 – via email to [email protected]
We aim to offer a 48-hour response time to the initial support requests. However, support requests sent to us via any other emails or methods other than those listed above, may not be picked up within this timeframe.
Where a support request is considered, an emergency Hipposerve will aim to investigate this as soon as is reasonably possible. An emergency is considered if the product is unavailable, unresponsive or unusable in some way.
If the fault of the issue is deemed to be that of the client, Hipposerve reserves the right to charge for any remedial action to fix the issue.
Looking After Our Customers
Use our hassle free legal info dashboard below to browse through our various terms and conditions.
Terms & Conditions
General terms and conditions relating to the use of our services. You need to agree to these before we supply a service to you.
Acceptable Use Policy
Acceptable use when using our services, in terms of disk space and bandwidth and other conditions
Domain Names T&C's
Terms and conditions related to the purchase and use of domain names.
Cookie Policy
General terms and conditions relating to the use of our cookies on our website and sales interface.
Privacy Policy
How we ensure that customer and site visitor data is protected.
Charging Policy
Information relating to the charging of our services
Special Offer Policy
Information and terms relating to any special offers that are available with Hipposerve.
Usage Policy
Information and Terms relating to the usage of our services
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Our SLA to our customers.
Address
Union House, 111 New Union Street
Coventry, West Midlands
CV1 2NT
Phone Number
+44 0330 043 1502
Anything Else?
Hipposerve - Hassle-Free FAQ's
Here are some answers to Frequently Asked Questions.
I already have a domain name, can I transfer this to you?
Yes, you can. There are different ways to do this depending on the type of domain name that you have, but our automated systems do most of the work for you. You will have to contact your existing domain registrar and tell them that you wish to move, and then our systems can do the rest. It takes a few days for the transfer to take place.
Can I upgrade a package, if I outgrow it?
Yes, you can automatically upgrade a package and you will be charged pro-rata from the time that you upgrade. If you are unsure what do do, just give us a call and we can go through the process with you.
Can I downgrade a package, if I am not using all the facilities?
Is is possible to downgrade all or hosting plans. However if you have purchased a 1 or 3 year discounted plans we will be unable to refund the difference and the price will be updated at the start of the next billing cycle. See our terms and conditions for further details.
What's the difference between shared hosting and other hosting plans
Shared hosting is a low-cost web hosting solution suitable for the vast majority of personal, community and small business websites. Whilst you have your own private space, resources are shared between other users on the server.
For customers with demanding or high traffic sites, or for those looking to host a web sites with faster speeds our Business Pro or VPS hosting is recommended. These are fully managed for you, and as always, hassle free.
What control panels does your hosting come with?
Our shared hosting plans all currently come with cPanel, which is perfect for managing all aspects of your website.
Our Business Pro plans come with a choice of Plesk or cPanel depending on your requirements.
Our VPS and Dedicated server solutions come with a range of control panels and software installation options suitable for individual needs. These can be customised for specific purposes by our Hippo Helper team.
How long does it take to set up an account?
It is worth remembering if you purchase a new domain name or transfer an existing name to us DNS propagation can take up to 72 hours. This is beyond our control.
What billing cycles do you offer?
On most of our products we offer monthly, annual or 3 year billing cycles.
In most cases, the longer the billing cycle, the more money you save.
Is my account backed up?
Whilst we backup our servers in the event of catastrophic failure, we do not provide these to customers to restore their services as a result of individual account failures.
We would always recommend that customers purchase one of our Hippo Care plans during the order process, which includes a full account nightly backup, with 30 day retention.
What payment methods do you accept?
We accept all major credit cards, direct debit and more than 50 different cryptocurrency coins.
We are also able to accept BACS payments by arrangement for annual or 3 yearly billing cycles only.
Can I resell my web space?
We offer specific hosting plans for web designers and developers who want to publish more than one website.
Significant savings can be had by signing up to one of these packages.
The more sites you add, the cheaper each site becomes!
We also take care of all the techie work, so you can get on with your design business
Can I have additional domains pointed at my account?
Yes, we actually recommend it. The more versions of your business name that you have parked or being used as an alias, the less chance there is of someone else using that name and passing themselves off as you.
All our packaged allow multiple domain name parking and our technical team will help you set it up.
Can I run an ecommerce site?
Of course, we support and are able to offer advice on a range of E-Commerce solutions.
