Service Level Agreement

This Service Level Agreement ("SLA") describes the availability commitment provided by Winter Storm Systems ("Winter Storm Systems", "WSS", "we", "us", "our") for eligible paid hosting services.

This SLA forms part of the agreement between Winter Storm Systems and the Customer and should be read together with our Terms of Service, including the Acceptable Use section within them.

1. Covered Services

Unless the applicable product page states otherwise, this SLA applies to active, paid:

• Virtual Private Server ("VPS") hosting;
• Shared web hosting;
• Game server hosting;
• Dedicated servers; and
• Other hosting services specifically identified by Winter Storm Systems as SLA-eligible.

This SLA does not apply to:

• Free services;
• Trial services;
• Beta or testing services;
• Development environments;
• Complimentary services;
• Custom or bespoke workloads, including bot hosting, script hosting and other services run to a Customer's own specification, whose availability depends primarily on Customer-supplied code and configuration;
• Services that are suspended;
• Services with an invoice that was past due at the time of the outage; or
• Products specifically identified as not being covered by an uptime SLA.

Domain registration, domain transfers, domain management, software licensing, web development and other non-hosting services are not covered by this SLA unless expressly stated otherwise.

2. Availability Commitment

Winter Storm Systems targets 98.5% monthly service availability for eligible services, measured on a calendar-month basis.

For reference, 98.5% availability permits approximately 10 hours and 48 minutes of qualifying downtime during a 30-day month before a service falls below the commitment.

A service is unavailable when its primary customer-facing function cannot be reached because of a failure within infrastructure operated by Winter Storm Systems, as shown by the monitoring described in section 3. Availability does not mean that every individual application, operating system, website, game server, database or piece of Customer-installed software will operate continuously.

Where a single incident affects more than one of a Customer's services, availability and any resulting credit are calculated separately for each affected service.

3. Measuring Availability

Monthly availability is calculated as:

Availability = (Total Minutes in Month − Qualifying Downtime) ÷ Total Minutes in Month × 100

Downtime is determined from external monitoring operated by or on behalf of Winter Storm Systems, which checks eligible services at intervals of no more than five minutes, together with our infrastructure logs and records from our providers. A failure is treated as downtime when it is confirmed by more than one consecutive check, so that a single missed check does not by itself register as an outage.

Continuous interruptions of less than five minutes are not counted as qualifying downtime.

Only qualifying downtime is included. Periods classified as Excluded Downtime under section 4 are not counted against the monthly commitment.

Where a service was not active for the whole calendar month — because it was ordered, cancelled or terminated part-way through — availability is calculated over the period during which the service was active and paid.

4. Excluded Downtime

The following are excluded from SLA calculations.

Scheduled maintenance

Maintenance announced in advance, where advance notice is reasonably possible. Scheduled maintenance may include operating system maintenance, hypervisor updates, network upgrades, hardware replacement, storage maintenance, security updates, electrical maintenance, cooling system maintenance, infrastructure upgrades, and migration between servers or facilities.

We will provide at least 24 hours' notice of planned maintenance where reasonably practical.

Emergency maintenance

Work necessary to protect customers, infrastructure, data, security or continued service operation. Emergency maintenance may be performed without advance notice when circumstances require immediate action.

Customer-caused issues

Outages caused by the Customer or by anything under the Customer's control, including incorrect configuration, operating system problems, Customer-installed software, malware, excessive resource consumption, firewall rules, deleted or corrupted files, Customer-issued reboots or shutdowns, Customer code, Customer-managed DNS, account compromise arising from Customer credentials, and actions performed through the Customer's account.

Suspension and enforcement

Downtime caused by suspension, limitation or termination of a service resulting from nonpayment, violation of our Terms of Service or the Acceptable Use section within them, abuse complaints, security threats, legal requirements, or activity that threatens Winter Storm Systems infrastructure or other customers.

Attacks and malicious activity

Downtime resulting from distributed denial-of-service ("DDoS") attacks, denial-of-service attacks, network attacks, exploitation attempts, malicious traffic, or other attacks that exceed the reasonable protection capabilities of the affected service or network.

External and upstream events

Outages caused by circumstances outside our reasonable control, including regional Internet outages, upstream carrier failures, Internet routing failures outside the WSS network, widespread utility outages, natural disasters, government actions, major telecommunications failures, third-party platform failures, and other force majeure events.

Failures of infrastructure that Winter Storm Systems operates and controls are not excluded under this heading merely because they involve physical hardware. Such failures are addressed in section 5.

Third-party services

Problems arising exclusively from services not operated by Winter Storm Systems, including third-party DNS providers, domain registries and registrars, payment processors, control panel vendors, software vendors, APIs and authentication providers.

5. Hardware Failures

Winter Storm Systems uses physical computing, storage, networking, electrical and cooling equipment to provide hosting services. Hardware can fail.

When a hardware failure occurs, we will make commercially reasonable efforts to restore affected services as quickly as reasonably practical. A hardware failure affecting WSS-operated infrastructure counts as qualifying downtime unless another exclusion in section 4 applies.

Replacement, repair, recovery and migration times vary with the nature of the failure, the availability of replacement hardware, the accessibility of the affected equipment and the recovery procedures required.

This SLA does not guarantee that any particular server, storage device, networking device, electrical component or cooling system will operate continuously.

6. Remote and On-Site Recovery

We may use remote administration, out-of-band management, automated recovery tools, monitoring systems and other remote-access technologies to diagnose and restore affected services.

Some incidents require physical access to WSS-operated infrastructure. Where physical intervention is required, restoration time varies with the nature of the incident and the time reasonably required to access, diagnose, repair, replace or restart the affected equipment.

Nothing in this SLA guarantees immediate on-site intervention or continuous on-site staffing. Any resulting qualifying downtime remains subject to the availability commitment and the service-credit provisions of this SLA.

7. Service Credits

If an eligible service falls below 98.5% monthly availability because of qualifying downtime, the Customer may request a service credit. Credits are calculated from the recurring monthly price of the affected service.

Monthly availability	Service credit
98.5% or greater	No credit
Below 98.5%, and 97.0% or greater	10%
Below 97.0%, and 95.0% or greater	25%
Below 95.0%	50%

Service credits:

• Apply only to the affected service;
• Are issued as account credit, which may be applied to invoices from the client area;
• Have no cash value and cannot be exchanged for cash;
• Cannot exceed 50% of the affected service's recurring monthly fee for any calendar month; and
• Do not include setup fees, licences, domain fees, taxes, add-ons, usage charges or other non-recurring charges.

Service credits are the sole remedy under this SLA for failure to meet the availability commitment, to the extent permitted by applicable law.

8. Requesting a Credit

SLA credits are not issued automatically.

A Customer requesting a credit must contact Winter Storm Systems within 14 days after the end of the calendar month in which the outage occurred, by opening a support ticket from the client area.

The request should include, where available: the account or Customer name; the affected service; the approximate date, time and duration of the outage; a description of the issue; and any relevant supporting information.

We will review monitoring records, infrastructure logs, provider information and other available evidence to determine whether qualifying downtime occurred. Our monitoring and records are normally used to determine availability, subject to reasonable consideration of evidence supplied by the Customer.

9. Maintenance and Outage Notifications

We may provide maintenance and outage notifications through any of the following:

• Our network status page;
• Announcements in the client area;
• Email; and
• The support system.

Customers are responsible for keeping their contact information accurate.

10. Support and Response Times

We will make reasonable efforts to respond to support requests as quickly as practical. Unless a specific product or support plan states otherwise, support response times are not guaranteed under this SLA, and the availability of technical support does not guarantee immediate restoration of service.

Some incidents require additional investigation, hardware replacement, third-party assistance or physical intervention before service can be restored.

11. Backups and Data

Service availability and backups are separate matters. Unless a particular product specifically includes managed backup services, this SLA does not guarantee the availability, integrity, retention or recoverability of Customer data.

Customers are responsible for maintaining independent backups of important data. Any backup services we offer are subject to the applicable product description and our Terms of Service.

12. No Guarantee of Uninterrupted Service

We design and operate our infrastructure with the goal of providing reliable service. No computer, network, electrical system, Internet connection, storage system, cooling system or hosting platform can be guaranteed to operate without interruption.

The 98.5% availability commitment defines the service level and the remedy available under this SLA when qualifying availability falls below the stated target. It is not a representation that a service will never experience outages, interruptions, maintenance, degradation or failure.

13. Changes to This SLA

We may modify this SLA as our services, infrastructure or business requirements change. Material changes take effect in accordance with the notice requirements in our Terms of Service or applicable law. Changes will not retroactively alter a credit that has already become eligible for a completed billing period.

The "Last updated" date above reflects the current version.

14. Contact

Questions about this SLA, and credit requests, should be submitted by opening a support ticket from your client area, or by email to [email protected].

Winter Storm Systems
4072 W 1650 N
Lehi, UT
84048