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 above), 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.
Support response
Tickets opened from the Panel are answered within: 4 business hours for critical issues (production down, payment broken, security incident); 1 business day for high-impact issues (single feature broken, performance degraded); 3 business days for general questions. Business hours are 09:00–17:00 Australia/Sydney, Monday to Friday excluding NSW public holidays. Out-of-hours coverage for critical incidents is best-effort.
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
Production hosting plans include daily off-site backups with 14-day retention. Backups are encrypted with age X25519 public-key encryption; the decryption private key is stored off-server in cold storage. Restoration from backup is a paid service except where a restore is required to recover from an incident caused by LochStudios.
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.
Changes
We may update this SLA; the current version is always published here with a version number and last-updated date. Material reductions to the uptime target will be announced at least 30 days in advance via the Panel.