Service Level Agreement

1. Scope

This service level agreement (SLA) applies to the managed services supplied by Coffee Cup Hosting Services, a trading name of Coffee Cup Solutions Ltd, and forms part of our terms of service.

This page describes how our service levels work. The figures that apply to you — the availability target, the target response and resolution times for each priority, the cover hours, and the service credit rates — are set out in the service level schedule attached to your order form. They vary by service and by the level of cover you have bought, so we do not publish a single set of numbers here. If you would like to see the schedule for a service before you buy, ask us and we will send it.

2. Availability commitment

We commit to making each service available for at least the percentage of each calendar month stated in your service level schedule, measured as set out below. Different services carry different targets: a single virtual server has a different realistic commitment from a replicated, load-balanced platform, and we would rather commit to something we can hold than publish a headline figure that quietly excludes everything.

2.1 How availability is measured

• Availability is measured per service, per calendar month, from our monitoring platform.
• A service is treated as unavailable when the monitored check for that service fails from more than one monitoring location and continues to fail for longer than the confirmation period stated in your schedule. This avoids a single transient packet loss being recorded as an outage.
• Downtime starts when the failure is confirmed by monitoring, or when you report the fault, whichever is earlier.
• Downtime ends when the service passes its monitored check again, or when we notify you that service is restored, whichever is earlier.
• Periods excluded under section 5 are not counted as downtime.
• Degraded performance that does not cause the monitored check to fail is handled as an incident under section 3 rather than as downtime.

3. Incident priorities

Every incident is assigned a priority when it is raised. The priority determines how quickly we respond, how we escalate it, and who we get out of bed. We set the priority using the definitions below, in discussion with you — if you think we have called it wrong, say so and we will reconsider immediately rather than argue about it during an outage.

P1 — Critical

A production service is completely unavailable, or is so severely impaired that it cannot be used for its business purpose, and there is no workaround. Also covers confirmed or strongly suspected security compromise of a production system, and total loss of data access.

Handling: worked continuously by an engineer from the moment it is raised, including outside business hours where you have out-of-hours cover. Escalated to a senior engineer immediately and to a director if it is not progressing. You receive updates at the interval stated in your schedule until service is restored, whether or not there is anything new to say. A written incident report follows.

P2 — High

A production service is significantly degraded, or an important function of it is unavailable, but the business can continue operating — for example, materially slow response times, one node of a cluster down, a failing backup job, or a mail flow issue affecting some users.

Handling: worked within cover hours with priority over routine work, with regular updates until it is resolved or reduced to a lower priority by an accepted workaround.

P3 — Medium

A fault or limitation that affects a non-production environment, or that affects production in a minor way with a reasonable workaround available. Also covers most standard change requests.

Handling: scheduled into normal working queues within cover hours, with an agreed target date.

P4 — Low

Questions, advice, information requests, cosmetic issues, documentation, and planned work with no immediate business impact.

Handling: answered within cover hours in the normal course of business, or scheduled by agreement.

3.1 Raising an incident

For anything you believe is a P1, ring 0118 384 2175. Email alone is not an appropriate way to raise a critical incident. For P2 to P4, email support@coffeecupsolutions.com or use the support portal. Please include the affected service, what you are seeing, when it started and who is affected — it materially shortens the time to a fix.

Target response and resolution times for each priority, and the hours during which they apply, are in your service level schedule. Response means an engineer has picked the incident up and made contact — not an automated acknowledgement.

4. Planned maintenance

Keeping platforms patched and current requires maintenance, and we would rather do it in a controlled window than react to a failure.

• Standard maintenance is carried out within the recurring maintenance window stated in your service level schedule. Windows are set outside normal UK business hours wherever the service allows.
• Notice. We give advance written notice of any planned maintenance expected to interrupt service, in accordance with the notice period in your schedule. The notice states what we are doing, when, the expected impact and the rollback position.
• Emergency maintenance may be needed to address a serious security vulnerability or an imminent risk of failure. We will give as much notice as the situation allows — sometimes that is very little — and we will explain afterwards why it could not wait.
• Customer-requested windows. If a standard window falls badly for your business, tell us and we will try to agree an alternative.
• Maintenance carried out within an agreed window, with the required notice given, does not count as downtime.

5. Exclusions

The availability commitment and the service credits do not apply to unavailability caused by:

• planned or emergency maintenance carried out in accordance with section 4;
• suspension of the service in accordance with our terms of service or acceptable use policy;
• faults in your own code, content, application, database schema, plugins, themes or third-party integrations;
• changes made by you, or by a third party acting on your behalf, without our involvement;
• your failure to act on a documented recommendation from us — for example declining to apply a critical update, or to resize a service we have told you is undersized;
• capacity exhaustion caused by usage exceeding the resource allocation in your order form;
• failure of your own connectivity, equipment, DNS held elsewhere, or your end users' networks;
• failure of third-party services outside our control that you have chosen to depend on, including external APIs, payment gateways and content delivery networks we do not manage;
• denial-of-service attack or other malicious action against you, beyond the mitigation included in your service;
• an event outside our reasonable control, as described in our terms of service;
• periods where your account is in arrears after due notice.

Where an exclusion applies we will still work the incident — this section is about whether a service credit is payable, not about whether we help.

6. Service credits

If we fail to meet the availability commitment for a service in a calendar month, you are entitled to a service credit against that service. The credit is calculated as a percentage of the monthly recurring charge for the affected service, on the sliding scale set out in your service level schedule — the further below the commitment the month falls, the larger the credit, up to the cap stated in that schedule.

6.1 How to claim

1. Submit the claim in writing to support@coffeecupsolutions.com within the claim period stated in your schedule, measured from the end of the month in which the failure occurred.
2. Identify the affected service, the dates and times of the unavailability, and the related incident or ticket references.
3. We will verify the claim against our monitoring records and the exclusions in section 5, and respond in writing with our calculation.
4. Approved credits are applied to your next invoice for the affected service.

6.2 Conditions

• Your account must be in good standing, with no undisputed overdue invoices, at the time of the claim.
• Credits are issued against future invoices and are not paid as cash, and they cannot exceed the monthly recurring charge for the affected service in the month concerned.
• Only one credit is payable per service per month, even if more than one incident occurred.
• Service credits are your sole and exclusive financial remedy for a failure to meet a service level. Rights of termination for persistent or material breach under the terms of service are unaffected.

7. Monitoring, reporting and reviews

We monitor the services we manage around the clock, with alerts routed to an on-call rota. Availability reporting for your services is available on request, and is provided as standard where your agreement says so.

Following any P1 incident we produce a written incident report covering what happened, the impact, the timeline, the root cause where it has been established, and the specific actions we are taking to reduce the chance of recurrence. We will not send you a report that says the cause was unknown and leave it there.

Where your agreement includes service reviews, we will meet at the agreed frequency to go through performance against these service levels, capacity trends, outstanding risks and planned work.

8. Your responsibilities

These commitments depend on some things being true at your end:

• keep an up-to-date list of authorised contacts with us, including an out-of-hours route to someone who can make decisions;
• report incidents promptly and through the correct channel for their priority;
• be available to help us reproduce, diagnose and verify the fix, particularly for application-level faults;
• approve emergency changes without undue delay when we recommend them during an incident;
• keep the parts of the stack you control patched and supported, and act on our sizing and security recommendations.

9. Changes to this SLA

We may update this SLA to reflect changes in the services or in our supply chain. We will give customers written notice of any material change before it takes effect. Where a change materially reduces the service levels applying to you, the change provisions of our terms of service apply.

10. Questions

To discuss the service levels applying to your services, or to see the service level schedule for a service before you buy it, email hello@coffeecupsolutions.com or ring 0118 384 2175.