Service Definitions: Hosting & Maintenance

1. Support & Communication

All support requests must be submitted via email. Requests made via social media, instant messaging, SMS or other methods are not monitored for SLA purposes.

Feature	Definition & Standard
Business Hours	09:30 – 14:30 GMT, Tuesday to Thursday (excluding UK Bank Holidays).
Response Time	The time taken to acknowledge a request and assign a priority level. This is not a “Resolution Time.”
Emergency Support	Defined as a “Site Down” or “Critical Security Breach.” Handled outside of standard hours at the Provider’s discretion.

The Provider may occasionally be unavailable due to annual leave or professional development. In such cases, Clients will be notified at least 14 days in advance. During these periods, Response Time targets may be extended or paused.

2. Maintenance & Security

Maintenance tasks are performed to ensure the stability and security of the website.

• Update Frequency: CMS core and plugin updates are performed Monthly.
• Security Scanning: We perform automated malware and vulnerability scans to block viruses, malware and suspicious uploads. All content uploads are scanned in real time. This is designed to block known virus and malware threats at the moment they are uploaded to the server.
• Performance Audits: Monthly reports (where included) include a summary of WordPress core and plugins updates completed, overview, broken and unresponsive links details, Google Analytics overview and reveal insights to improve SEO rankings.

3. Backup & Recovery Policy

The Provider maintains supplementary backups to assist in disaster recovery.

Detail	Specification
Backup Frequency	Daily off-site backups of the database and file system.
Retention Period	Backups are retained for 31 days. Data older than 31 days cannot be recovered.
Recovery Requests	Restores requested due to Client error may incur a fee.
Client Responsibility	The Client is advised to maintain their own independent local backup of essential data.

4. Service Level Targets (Uptime)

We aim for a 99.9% uptime target.

• Exclusions: Uptime targets do not include scheduled maintenance windows (usually performed between 00:00 and 05:00 GMT), necessary maintenance, client caused outages, outages caused by the third-party Hosting Provider or issues beyond the Provider or Hosting Provider’s reasonable control.
• Monitoring: We use external monitoring tools to check site availability every 5 minutes.

5. Task Prioritisation

When a request is received, it is categorised as follows:

1. Priority 1 (Critical): Site is inaccessible or checkout is broken. Target Response: 4 Business Hours.
2. Priority 2 (High): Significant functionality is broken (e.g., contact forms not working). Target Response: 8 Business Hours.
3. Priority 3 (Standard): General CSS tweaks, text edits, or image swaps. Target Response: 24–48 Business Hours.

While the Provider will make every effort to meet these targets, they are intended as a guideline and do not constitute a contractual guarantee of resolution time.