Service Level Agreement

What this SLA covers

This Service Level Agreement applies to production hosting plans, mailbox hosting plans, and the LochStudios Panel itself. It does not apply to domain registry availability (which is governed by the registry), third-party services we resell as add-ons (Microsoft 365, Stripe, Twilio — each governed by their own provider SLA), beta features explicitly flagged as such, or services where you have asked us to skip a scheduled maintenance window.

Uptime target

We target 99.9% monthly uptime for production hosting and the Panel. Uptime is measured by our own status agent (the same one that powers the public status page) plus an independent external check. Scheduled maintenance, announced at least 48 hours in advance via the Panel and the status page, does not count against uptime.

Credits

If monthly uptime falls below 99.9% (excluding the carve-outs below), you may request a service credit: 10% of the monthly fee for 99.0–99.89% uptime, 25% for 95.0–98.99%, and 50% for under 95%. Credits are applied to your next invoice and are the sole remedy for missed uptime. Credit requests must be lodged within 30 days of the affected month.

Exclusions

Outages caused by: customer action (bad deploy, expired credentials, exceeded plan limits); customer-controlled DNS or registrar configuration; force majeure events (natural disaster, war, sustained large-scale internet outage upstream); or third-party platforms outside our control are excluded from uptime calculation and not eligible for credit.

Support response

Support tickets are opened from the Panel. When you open or submit a ticket, the Portal shows an estimated average wait time. That figure reflects how long tickets currently in our pending queue have been waiting for a first reply — a live estimate of queue conditions, not a guaranteed response time for your individual ticket.

We work to answer support requests as quickly as we can. Actual response times depend on queue depth, request complexity, staffing, and when the ticket was received. We aim to reply to every support request in the queue within 4 hours during queue hours.

The support team works the queue every day, including weekends, from 08:00 to 22:00 Australia/Sydney across two shifts (08:00–15:00 and 15:00–22:00). Tickets received outside those hours are handled when the next shift begins.

Incidents and postmortems

Service-affecting incidents are posted to the status page as soon as they are confirmed, with rolling updates until resolution. Incidents that breach the uptime target are followed by a written postmortem published on the status page within 14 days, covering: timeline, contributing factors, customer impact, and the corrective actions taken.

Backups and data

For cPanel hosting plans, backups are taken automatically by Acronis. Even though this is in place, we strongly recommend that you maintain and store your own backups on a remote host or local computer.

Acronis backups are stored on an external server so they are fully redundant. These backups do not count toward your cPanel account disk-space usage.

Backups run hourly. Restore points are merged across a 30-day retention window, which works out to:

• Hourly — one backup per hour for the past 12 hours
• Daily — one backup per day for the past 3 days
• Weekly — one backup per week for the past 4 weeks
• Monthly — one backup for the current month

Changes

We may update this SLA at any time without prior notice; the current version is always published here with a version number and last-updated date. Continued use of the service after a change is acceptance of the updated SLA.