1. Purpose and scope
This Service Level Agreement (the "SLA") forms part of the GINERNET Terms and Conditions. It sets out the availability commitment for the Base Infrastructure of the Covered Services and the credits the Client may request if that commitment is not met.
Anything not covered by this SLA is governed by the Terms and Conditions. On availability and compensation for unavailability, this SLA prevails.
This SLA does not apply to:
- a) free, trial, beta or promotional services;
- b) the Manager, its API, the web or VNC console, reverse DNS, backups and snapshots, technical support and its response times, or the performance of the services.
2. Definitions
Covered Services: the following services contracted through the Manager:
- a) VPS, self-managed or managed;
- b) web hosting with a control panel (cPanel hosting).
Base Infrastructure: the elements that GINERNET directly operates and controls to provide the Covered Service: the physical servers and their storage, the network equipment, the operation of the virtualisation platform and GINERNET's own network up to its interconnection point with third-party networks.
Unavailability: a situation in which, due to a cause attributable to the Base Infrastructure and for at least ten (10) consecutive minutes:
- a) for a VPS: it has no connectivity at all from the Internet, or it is stopped and cannot be started from the Manager;
- b) for web hosting: the server hosting the service responds neither at network level nor on its web service.
Slowness, high latency, partial packet loss, the failure of a specific port, protocol or service (for example, only email or only a database), or the failure of a specific website, account or application while the server keeps running, are not Unavailability.
Unavailability Time: minutes of Unavailability counted from the moment the Client opens a support ticket in the Manager reporting the incident until GINERNET verifies that the service has been restored.
Monthly Availability: the percentage resulting from the formula Availability = 100 × (T − Ti) / T, where T is the number of minutes in the calendar month during which the service was active and Ti is the sum of the service's Unavailability Times in that month.
Monthly Amount of the Affected Service: the amount actually charged to the Client for the affected Covered Service during the calendar month in which the Unavailability occurred. It excludes taxes, setup fees, third-party licences and products (for example cPanel, CloudLinux, Imunify360, LiteSpeed or JetBackup), excess traffic, payment fees and any service other than the affected one.
3. Availability commitment
GINERNET commits to a Monthly Availability of the Base Infrastructure of 99.9% for each Covered Service.
GINERNET monitors its infrastructure with its own monitoring tools and publishes the network status and maintenance windows on its status page. GINERNET's monitoring records and the ticketing system are the reference for calculating Availability, save for manifest error.
If the Client's configuration prevents GINERNET from checking the status of the service (for example, because it blocks all monitoring traffic), GINERNET may verify it by other means, such as the server's state on the virtualisation platform. If verification is not possible, the period will not count as Unavailability.
4. Service credits
If the commitment is not met, the Client may request a credit on the Monthly Amount of the Affected Service:
| Monthly Availability | Unavailability Time in a 30-day month | Credit |
|---|---|---|
| Below 99.9% and 99.5% or above | 44 to 216 minutes (up to 3 h 36 min) | 10% |
| Below 99.5% and 99.0% or above | 217 to 432 minutes (up to 7 h 12 min) | 25% |
| Below 99.0% | More than 432 minutes (more than 7 h 12 min) | 50% |
The minutes are indicative and refer to a 30-day month (43,200 minutes). The credit is always calculated with the Monthly Availability formula in section 2, so in months of a different length, or if the service was not active for the whole month, the thresholds in minutes vary proportionally.
Credit conditions:
- a) Credits are paid as balance in the Client's account in the Manager, in the currency of the affected service. They are non-refundable, cannot be exchanged for money, are non-transferable and have no value outside the Manager.
- b) The total credit per service and month will not exceed 50% of the Monthly Amount of the Affected Service, even if there are several incidents.
- c) Credits below 1 EUR or 1 USD will not be issued.
- d) Only accounts that have no outstanding debt and whose service is not suspended, both at the time of the incident and at the time of the request, are entitled to credits.
5. Request procedure
Credits are not applied automatically. To request one, the Client must open a ticket in the Manager within seven (7) calendar days after the incident is resolved, stating:
- the affected service (name or IP);
- the approximate start and end date and time;
- the reference of the ticket with which the incident was reported.
GINERNET will check the request against its records and communicate its decision within a maximum of thirty (30) days. Requests submitted late, or without a prior ticket reporting the incident, will be rejected.
6. Exclusions
Interruptions or degradation caused by the following do not count as Unavailability and give no right to credits:
- a) Maintenance. Scheduled maintenance announced at least 48 hours in advance by email, in the Manager or on the status page, and urgent maintenance needed to apply critical security fixes or prevent an imminent risk to data or infrastructure.
- b) Client actions. Acts or omissions of the Client, its users or third parties with access to its account or services, including reboots, reinstallations, configuration or firewall changes (including the Manager's firewall), use of the console or rescue mode, upgrades, migrations, restores and any operation requested by the Client.
- c) What happens inside the service. Failures of the operating system, guest kernel, software or configuration of the service; exhaustion of the allocated resources (CPU, memory, disk, inodes, processes or per-account resource limits); malware or intrusions.
- d) Third-party software and services installed or used on the service, even if GINERNET supplies, licenses, installs or manages them. For example: control panels (cPanel/WHM), security software (Imunify360, CloudLinux, firewalls), web servers (LiteSpeed), backup software (JetBackup) and operating systems. This expressly includes:
- failures or regressions introduced by vendor updates, whether applied automatically or applied by GINERNET following the vendor's procedure;
- false positives, blocks or quarantines by security software, including the blocking of the Client's own IP addresses;
- outages of the vendor's licence servers, repositories or APIs.
- e) Defects in third-party base software: virtualisation platform, hypervisor, firmware, drivers and storage systems, when the origin is an error, defect or regression in the vendor's own software. This includes the reasonable time needed to apply the fix or workaround published by the vendor.
- f) Third-party infrastructure:
- power supply, cooling, fire suppression, physical security and facilities of the data centre;
- third-party transit, internet exchange, fibre or connectivity networks, and widespread Internet incidents outside GINERNET's network;
- external DNS services, domain registries and certificate authorities.
- g) Attacks. Denial-of-service or other attacks, whether against the Client's service or against the infrastructure, and the mitigation measures taken to protect the service, the infrastructure or other clients (filtering, rate limiting, diversion or route withdrawal).
- h) Suspensions provided for in the Terms: lack of balance, debt, abuse, breach of the acceptable use policy, pending account verification, security reasons or legal requirements.
- i) Force majeure, as set out in clause 49 of the Terms and Conditions.
- j) Factors outside the Base Infrastructure: the Internet connection and equipment of the Client or its users, DNS propagation, blacklists or IP reputation, and filtering applied by third parties.
Exclusions d), e) and f) will not apply when the Unavailability is due to wilful misconduct or gross negligence by GINERNET.
7. Sole and exclusive remedy
The credits under this SLA are the Client's sole and exclusive remedy for Unavailability or for breach of this SLA. They give no right to any additional compensation for damages, loss of profit, loss of business, data or reputation.
This is without prejudice to the limitation of liability in clause 43 of the Terms and Conditions and to the rights that mandatory law grants to Clients who are consumers.
8. Changes
GINERNET may amend this SLA in accordance with clause 47 of the Terms and Conditions, giving at least thirty (30) days' notice. Amendments will not apply to incidents that occurred before they came into force.