Hosted: Service Level Agreement (SLA)

A. Summary

We hope setting clear performance expectations with measurable accountability and transparency will encourage you to grow your organization with us as much as our expert support, service features, convenience and affordability.

This SLA is comprised of goals we make commercially reasonable efforts to meet, and promises about the minimum expectations you should have of our Service. We will not always meet our goals: they define our targets. If we do not meet our promises, we will reevaluate our operations and as applicable, provide service credits based on non-performance penalties documented below.

Striving to learn from our experience, and in the spirit of setting clear expectations, we have taken this SLA a step further.  We document our expectations for your goals, too, so you can be prepared to benefit most from our Service.

B. Our Goals

  1. Assume your positive intent: 100%
  2. Remember email is critical to your business: 100%
  3. Up-time: 100%
  4. Outage Response: under 15 minutes 24×7
  5. Self-restore, roll-back, undelete, backup availability: 100 days
  6. Online help desk Trouble Ticket Response, based on your reasonable prioritization
    1.    Low: 10 days, no material productivity loss associated with the issue
    2.    Medium: 7 days, there may be a work slowdown caused by the issue (the default priority for email tickets)
    3.    High: 3 days, one person may be experiencing a work slowdown
    4.    Urgent: 48 hours, one person’s work is stopped, or a group may be slowed
    5.    Emergency: 24 hours, a group’s work may be stopped, or a company’s may be slowed
    6.    Critical: today, and as soon as practical, a company’s work is stopped due to an issue
  7. Chat/phone response: under 5 minutes during regular Availability
  8. System upgrades and updates: use scheduled maintenance periods for system maintenance no more than an average of once per month, to test and apply critical updates as soon as practical, materially useful minor software updates within 3 months of release, major updates within 6 months of release.

C. Our Promises

  1. Up-time: average monthly: 99.90% (typically means less than 45 minutes/month!)
  2. Outage Response: under 1 hour, 24×7

D. Your Goals

  1. Assume our positive intent that we want to help you. We do.  Taking care of you is not only a job for most of us.  Most of the time it’s much more.  Our team is composed of career support technologists each averaging more than 3 years Zimbra experience, and even more with mobile devices, email, groupware and technology management.
  2. Remember the technology is such we cannot guarantee 100% up-time, nor resolution of issues within a specific time-frame, only rapid, professional response, an up-time consistent with our reported track-record, and that we are devoted. That is: we are collaboration specialists with nothing better to do than improve your email and collaboration experience, and fix issues as they occur.
  3. Check your Internet and network functions prior to communicating with us about a service issue:
    1. wait at least 10 minutes for us to report information about your issue; and
    2. in the event of a reported issue, stay-tuned to the systems status and support team situation updates instead of contacting us, so we can focus on resolution.
  4. Help us to help you. Review and apply our published best practices for describing service issues.  Use our comment, rating and feedback system, among others, to identify documentation that needs updating and improvement. You’ll find us responsive.
  5. Reasonably assign a priority to your tickets based on our priorities description.
  6. Base your ticket priority on issues directly caused by our systems, that is, issues that we can directly impact and resolve.
  7. In the event you have an external issue causing urgency, for example you are migrating from problem ISPs/mail hosts, or you must quickly remove/change a technical or billing contact for your organization, please call in addition to submitting a ticket, so we can activate a coordinated emergency response.
  8. Help us to help you, more. In the event you assign Emergency or Critical priorities, patiently explain why the issue has such priority for you and your organization in the ticket body so that we clearly understand the imperative.
  9. Please keep in mind we must make decisions in the interest of all of our users, for example, while ticket priority is assigned by you, ticket priority is ultimately determined by us at our sole discretion, and tickets of the same priority are typically prioritized first-come, first served.  If you prefer more independence, or require a stricter SLA, please consider contacting Us about an exclusive solution, dedicated to your organization’s needs alone.

E. Our Non-Performance Penalties

Average monthly Up-time

99.90% to 100.00%     0%

99.70% to 99.89%       10%

99.50% to 99.69%       25%

99.49% or below         50%

Outage Response

Less than an hour       0%

1 to 1.99 hours            10%

2 to 3.99 hours            25%

4 hours or greater       50%

Restrictions

To benefit from the guarantees offered by this SLA, you must have accepted the terms of our Terms of Service (ToS) in full, be in good financial standing with us, and have active, paid mailboxes subject to the Outage Impact for the calendar month during which non-performance occurred.

Non-performance penalties are not cumulative for any one calendar month. If multiple non-performance penalties apply for a given calendar month, the largest single penalty shall apply.

When due, service credits for our non-performance are limited to:

  1. future services;
  2. credit only for the number of active mailboxes subject to Outage Impact;
  3. up to 50%, based on our non-performance penalties, of the calendar month in which the non-performance occurred; and
  4. requests for service credits received by our Billing department through the Customer Center within 30 days of the end of the calendar month during which non-performance occurred, specifying the number and names of Outage Impact mailboxes.

We only can guarantee service within those areas under the direct control of our company, including only our software, servers, data centers, links to the Internet, routers and switches. You shall not receive any credits under this SLA in connection with any Outage, failure or deficiency caused by or associated with:

  1. circumstances beyond our reasonable control, including, without limitation, your former ISP or mail provider(s), acts of any governmental body, terrorism, war, insurrection, sabotage, theft, armed conflict, embargo, fire, flood, strike or other labor disturbance, interruption of or delay in transportation, unavailability of or interruption or delay in telecommunications or third party services, virus attacks or hackers, failure of third party software or inability to obtain raw materials, supplies, access or power used in or equipment needed for provision of this SLA;
  2. failure of bandwidth providers to our Data Centers, unless such failure is caused solely by us or our Data Centers;
  3. Scheduled Maintenance and emergency maintenance and upgrades, such as and not limited to the case of installing security patch releases;
  4. Firewall and DNS issues outside the direct control of our Data Centers;
  5. any and all failures associated with Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) services;
  6. issues with your mail or other client access, such as an not limited to your client software’s ability to use LDAP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, ActiveSync, WebDAV or FTP protocols;
  7. false SLA breaches reported as a result of outages or errors of any of our measurement systems;
  8. your acts or omissions (or acts or omissions of others engaged or authorized by customer), including, without limitation, custom scripting or coding (e.g., CGI, Perl, HTML, ASP, etc.), any negligence, or willful misconduct;
  9. delays in e-mail or webmail delivery and transmission;
  10. data loss or unavailability;
  11. DNS (Domain Name Server) Propagation;
  12. outages elsewhere on the Internet that hinder access to your account;
  13. Testing failures that do not result in unavailability of hosting services, such as and not limited to third-party monitoring system errors, and Testing misconfigurations;
  14. unmonitored services; and
  15. browser or DNS caching that may make your web mail or domain admin appear inaccessible when others can still access it