Vistacast SaaS Service Level Agreement (SLA)
VISTACAST, as a provider of hosting services, strives for 100% reliability. Of course, in the real world and despite best efforts, failure does occasionally occur. This Service Level Agreement (SLA) outlines our guarantee of service availability, procedure for determining failure, and remedy to you, our customer, in the event of an outage. This SLA applies separately to each account using VISTACAST services.
SERVICE CREDITS
Service credits are calculated as a percentage of the total charges paid by a VISTACAST customer (excluding one-time payments such as setup charges) for any service that has been verified as unavailable. If a VISTACAST customer subscribes to multiple services, service credit will only be issued for those services verified as unavailable and will not be applied to non-impacted services. Service credits will be issued on the next invoice that has not already been generated and applied against future payments otherwise due from a VISTACAST customer and are not offered as any form of cash payment or refund against current or prior invoices.
NETWORK SLA and VISTACAST COMMITMENT
VISTACAST guarantees at least 99.95% network availability (uptime) as measured during a monthly billing cycle to services provided to a VISTACAST client in good standing and uses commercially reasonable efforts to achieve and monitor service availability. If VISTACAST fails to meet this commitment, an affected customer may be eligible to receive a service credit as described below.
| Monthly Uptime Percentage | Credit Percentage |
| Less than 99.95% but equal to or greater than 99.0% | 5% |
| Less than 99.0% | 10% |
- Network uptime is determined by the availability of the VISTACAST core network (ie: border routers, edge routers, customer switching routers) to an independent network of 9 worldwide monitoring stations. Monitoring is performed by individual stations in a round-robin manner.
- If any single station detects an error, the next station in line will check and the combined results are cross-checked by a 3rd station. In this manner, all reported incidents are confirmed by at least 2 stations.
- Aggregated network uptime is displayed on our website under Network Tools and accessible by customers at all times.
POWER
VISTACAST guarantees 100% electrical power availability (uptime) to dedicated electrical circuit customers and at least 99.95% electrical power availability (uptime) as measured during a monthly billing cycle. In all cases, VISTACAST will ensure availability using technologies that may include redundant utility services, UPS, and emergency generator.
| Monthly Uptime Percentage | Credit Percentage |
| Less than 100% but equal or greater to 99.95% | N/A |
| Less than 99.95% but equal to or greater than 99.0% | 5% |
| Less than 99.0% | 10% |
- The receipt of a service credit equal to the applicable credit percentage shall be the sole and exclusive remedy in the event of a confirmed period of downtime.
PLATFORM
Platform includes the physical hardware and any composite software layers such as virtualization technology responsible for providing the hosting service. It includes the operating system inside servers, and any other application layer software.
VISTACAST guarantees at least 99.95% Platform availability (uptime) as measured during a monthly billing cycle to services provided to a VISTACAST client in good standing and uses commercially reasonable efforts to achieve service and monitor availability.
| Monthly Uptime Percentage | Credit Percentage |
| Less than 100% but equal or greater to 99.95% | N/A |
| Less than 99.95% but equal to or greater than 99.0% | 5% |
| Less than 99.0% | 10% |
SOFTWARE
In order to provide the highest quality of service, once our engineers identify a threat or updated software, we follow a strict quality assurance procedure before installing the update. This involves determining the urgency of the patch so we can allocate appropriate engineering resources, perform a thorough routine of automated and human testing to ensure full compatibility with other software on our servers, then begin initial rollout to non-critical servers before increasing our rollout in phases to all other customers. While this process can take as little as a few hours in some more complex cases we are required to perform even more thorough procedures which can take longer but are essential to ensure the stability of your services.
Our guaranteed installation period begins when we have completed our quality assurance and are confident, we can reliably deploy the updated software to our server. In many cases we can implement temporary security patches or workarounds to protect you during this process.
MONITORING
Monitoring helps us to maintain a highly reliable service – by monitoring important parts of your server we’re alerted to problems as soon as they develop and can proactively put things right before they cause service disruption.
Although we try to detect all faults, software is complex and there are always new and diverse ways things can misbehave. We cannot guarantee to locate every possible fault condition, particularly as these are sometimes specific to a particular application code.
SECURITY PATCHING
Our team of experienced server engineers regularly monitor a wide range of information sources to ensure we are aware of emerging security threats. Our extensive experience and the technology we work with allows us to patch our servers in most cases without any downtime at all, or occasionally with a very quick service restart to ensure you are very quickly and fully protected.
CREDIT REQUEST and ELIGIBILITY PROCEDURES
Credit requests are typically processed within 30 days of receipt. In order to be eligible for credit, a customer request must be made via email submitted to our customer support address at support@vistacast.com within 30 days after the incident for which credit is requested has occurred. Late requests, incomplete requests or requests made by other means may not be considered or honored.
In all cases, VISTACAST retains sole discretionary power when determining if a guarantee has not been met. If availability is impacted by factors other than those used in our Monthly Uptime Percentage calculation, then we may issue a Service Credit considering such factors at our discretion.
SLA EXCLUSIONS
VISTACAST will make SLA service credit available in connection with eligible incidents. Customers shall not receive credits under this SLA in connection with any failure or unavailability caused by or associated with:
- Suspension of service due to AUP violations or non-payment;
- Scheduled Maintenance and Emergency Maintenance periods;
- Failure of bandwidth providers or access circuits outside VISTACAST control;
- Customer-provided equipment including but not limited to network interface equipment, server, disk-array, power supply, PDU/power strip or surge protector;
- False SLA breaches reported as a result of outages or errors of any measurement system;
- DNS issues outside the direct control of VISTACAST;
- Circumstances beyond the reasonable control of VISTACAST, including, without limitation, reasons of Force Majeure, unavailability of or interruption or delay in telecommunications or third party services, virus attacks or hackers, failure of third party software (including, without limitation, ecommerce software, payment gateways, chat, statistics or free scripts) or inability to obtain raw materials, supplies, or power used in or equipment needed for provision of this SLA;
MAINTENANCE WINDOWS
Maintenance windows may be required from time to time in order to ensure ongoing reliability of hosted assets.
Scheduled Maintenance shall mean any maintenance of which customer is notified 48 hours in advance and is performed during an announced maintenance window. Notice of Scheduled Maintenance will be provided to customer’s designated point of contact by email. It is the customer’s responsibility to ensure an up-to-date contact list within our Customer Portal. Emergency Maintenance may be performed at any time in order to ensure the ongoing safe and reliable operations of the network or datacenter infrastructure and best effort will be made to notify customers within a reasonable timeframe although no prior notice can be guaranteed.
CHANGES and LIMITATIONS
This SLA is subject to change at the sole discretion of VISTACAST, without notice to customer. The most recent revision of this document will be posted to Vistacast web site. All changes made to the SLA will be effective five (5) days after the first publishing date.