Hosting SLA

This agreement is given by Atheron Network Inc., a company incorporated in British Columbia, Canada.

It applies to the production environment of a project we host for you under a statement of work or a hosting plan, under our master services agreement.

It does not apply to a setup we build on your own provider account (there, your provider's own terms apply), to servers on your premises, or to test and staging environments.

We run your project on the provider and size your SOW names: DigitalOcean by default, or Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Hetzner or Vultr. Running it means:

• monitoring the application and its servers, with alerts to us;
• applying security updates to the servers every night, and restarting them when an update needs it, inside a quiet window;
• snapshotting servers and backing up databases every 8 hours, and checking that the backups work;
• renewing certificates and domains we manage for you;
• reviewing what the setup costs and telling you when a change would save money or is needed for growth.

Hosting is billed monthly in advance. Where hosting is bought through Stripe's checkout, Stripe sells you that subscription as merchant of record, collects its tax and handles its payment under its own terms; we still provide the hosting under this agreement.

Uptime is the share of minutes in a calendar month, in Vancouver time, in which the production application's main address answers our outside monitor normally. A minute counts as down when the monitor finds it unavailable for that whole minute.

• planned maintenance we announce to your owners at least 2 business days ahead, no more than 4 hours a month in total;
• urgent security fixes that cannot wait, which we keep as short as we can and tell you about;
• a failure of the provider's whole region, or of the internet beyond our network, that affects its customers generally;
• a fault in code, content or settings changed by anyone other than us, or in a service your product depends on that we do not run;
• traffic well beyond what your SOW sizes the setup for, or an attack beyond what our protection can absorb;
• a suspension under the acceptable use policy or for non-payment.

If a month's uptime falls below the commitment, you get a credit on that month's hosting fee:

Ask for a credit in the client portal within 30 days after the month ends. We confirm it against our monitoring, and it comes off your next hosting invoice. Credits are at most 50% of a month's hosting fee, cannot be exchanged for cash, and are the remedy for missed uptime, except that if uptime is below the commitment three months in a row, you may also end the hosting without penalty.

Our monitoring alerts us when your site stops answering, and we start work on it straight away when we are working, and at the latest on the next business day. Business days are as our statement of work terms define them.

With a support plan, you can also report a problem yourself, and we answer within the first-response time your plan states in your SOW. A plan that covers any hour of the week brings that response at any hour.

After an outage that breaks the commitment, we tell you what happened, what we did and what we are changing.

Servers are snapshotted and databases backed up every 8 hours, and the most recent copies are kept as they rotate. If data has to be restored, we restore the latest good copy, so up to 8 hours of changes before the problem can be lost. Where your SOW needs more, such as point-in-time recovery or copies in a second region, it says so.

Keep your accounts and keys safe, tell us before a launch or campaign that will bring much more traffic than usual, use the hosting within the acceptable use policy, and pay hosting invoices on time.

We do not take a site offline for a late hosting payment without first telling your owners in writing and giving at least 14 days to pay.

After any minimum term in your SOW, hosting runs month to month, and either of us can end it at the end of a month by giving the other 30 days' written notice. We then hand over a copy of your application and its data, and can help move it to your own account under a SOW. We delete what we hold within 30 days after the hosting ends, as our data processing addendum describes.

The laws of British Columbia, Canada, and the federal laws of Canada that apply there, govern this document. Disputes are heard by the courts of British Columbia, Canada.

This agreement is published in English and in French. Both versions are equally authoritative.