Teracore Managed WordPress Web Hosting
Service Level Agreement

Definitions

  • Webhost, host, Teracore, our, we: Teracore Ltd, the WordPress hosting provider.
  • Owner, User, Client, You, Your: The paying customer, who utilizes the services provided by Teracore.
  • Scheduled Maintenance: Maintenance that is announced at least 48 hours in advance.
  • Technical Support: Support for Domain, DNS and Server related issues.
  • Managed WordPress Hosting Support: Support related to your WordPress website.
  • Email and 3rd party Integration Support: Support for your email account and 3rd party applications you have integrated with your WordPress website. 
  • Privacy policy and cookie consent: Support for making sure your website is GDPR, CCPA, LGPD and POPI compliant

The SLA

This Service Level Agreement (the “SLA”) is part of your agreement with Teracore for the provision of services in accordance with the service and pricing as laid out on the hosting plan pricing page (https://Teracore.co.za/hosting-plans/) and order forms.

This SLA defines the scope and limits of Teracore’s responsibility in providing our services and the options available to you in the event that we do not meet these service commitments. 

This SLA and the refunds presented herein are Teracore’s sole obligation and your only form of reimbursement should we fail to meet our service commitments.

Your Website On Our Hosting Service

Our service is designed to support a wide range of WordPress websites, but every site is unique. While site A could easily serve thousands of page views, site B might only be able to handle 50 users before stability and performance become an issue. Every website will perform differently, even on identical hosting packages. For these reasons, 503 errors on your site does not count as an outage of our service.

In certain cases our service would be the cause of your website downtime. It could be a misconfiguration, failed automations, bugs in our code, etc. The distinction between your site and our hosting service is important in the context of an SLA.

Our goal is to help you and your business succeed, we will respond to issues promptly and professionally, we will offer guidance and advice on best practices as it pertains to WordPress security and performance.

Public cloud IaaS vendor risk assessment and agreement

Teracore utilizes services from various Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers for many computing, digital storage and network services used to deliver the Teracore hosting service to customers.

These Vendors include and are not limited to Digital Ocean (https://www.digitalocean.com/), Linode (https://www.linode.com/), Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/), Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/), UpCloud (https://upcloud.com/), Domains.co.za(https://www.domains.co.za/),  Amazon Web Services (https://aws.amazon.com/), Google Cloud (https://cloud.google.com/), and other public cloud vendors chosen by Teracore.

Parties agree that the use of cloud IaaS vendors has inherent and implied risks of disruptions in availability, performance, uptime and other aspects of use including but not limited to potential data loss, security issues, and government agency monitoring or interference whether known or unknown. Accepted industry best practices in systems architecture design, information security, and business process have been employed by Teracore as is commercially feasible to mitigate the possible effects these disruptions may have on our service and our clients use thereof. No guarantee, SLA, warranty, or assurance is offered or implied by Teracore as it may relate to those events that are or may be reasonably determined outside of Teracore’s influence or control. This SLA and the Service Availability Commitment cover the provision of access by Teracore to the internet and global “public cloud” network. Routing anomalies, asymmetries, inconsistencies and failures of the Internet or IaaS vendor outside the control of Teracore can and will occur and such instances shall not be considered any failure of the Service Availability Commitment.

Uptime – Web server availability monitoring

We monitor website uptime with https://betteruptime.com/.
When we check your site, we ping your site’s homepage (via an HTTP HEAD request) every 5 minutes, with a 30-second failure threshold, from 4 different geographical locations. 

After redirects (3xx), If the HTTP status code returned is outside the 2xx (success)  range the site will be marked as down and a notification is sent to our engineers.

Example of uptime status: https://status.teracore.co.za/

Service commitments

We guarantee that our service will be available and free of material defects for use by customers at a minimum amount of hours in a calendar month.

  • Pro and Business packages – 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
  • Enterprise Package – 99.99% Uptime Guarantee 

SLA level of 99.9% uptime/availability results in the following periods of allowed downtime/unavailability:

  • Daily: 1m 26s
  • Weekly: 10m 4s
  • Monthly: 43m 49s
  • Quarterly: 2h 11m 29s
  • Yearly: 8h 45m 56s

In the event that our service does not achieve the service commitment in a given month (see Excluded Events below) for Pro and Business packages the following credit plan will apply.

  • 45 – 90 mins : 5%
  • 90 – 180 mins: 8%
  • 180 – 300 Mins: 12%
  • 300 – 420 Mins: 20%

Thereafter we will credit 20% of your monthly service fees for each additional three (3) hours of service unavailability experienced up to 100% (for all Service Credits in a given month) of the monthly service fees for those Services affected.

SLA level of 99.99% uptime/availability results in the following periods of allowed downtime/unavailability:

  • Daily: 8s
  • Weekly: 1m 0s
  • Monthly: 4m 22s
  • Quarterly: 13m 8s
  • Yearly: 52m 35s

In the event that our service does not achieve the service commitment in a given month (see Excluded Events below) for Enterprise packages the following credit plan will apply.

  • 5-60 Mins : 5%
  • 60-90 Mins: 8%
  • 90-120 Mins: 12%
  • 120-180 Mins: 20%

Thereafter we will credit 20% of your monthly service fees for each additional three (3) hours of service unavailability experienced up to 100% (for all Service Credits in a given month) of the monthly service fees for those Services affected.

Excluded Events

No Service Credits will be given for service interruptions: (i) caused by the action or failure to act by you or your personnel, (ii) due to failure of any equipment provided by you, (iii) which are the result of scheduled maintenance, (iv) due to a force majeure event, (v) for which you are entitled to a Service Credit for the same or contemporaneous Service Commitment failure or (vi) resulting from your breach of the Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy or any other policies and procedures of Teracore (vii) any issue arising as a result of a failure, outage, negligence, or other disruption of service at the underlying IaaS provider.

Security

Read more about security at Teracore here – https://teracore.co.za/wordpress-security-teracore/

Backups

We employ comprehensive backup schedules on all of our hosting plans. The retention period is 14 days. Business and Enterprise clients may provide their own credentials for OneDrive, Dropbox, pCloud, Amazon S3 or DigitalOcean Spaces to have a copy of the backup sent to their cloud storage provider.

Pro Package

  • Monthly complete server backups stored with IaaS Provider
  • Daily local WordPress backups stored on the server
  • Weekly WordPress backups sent to Wasabi remote storage.

Business Package

  • Monthly complete server backups stored with IaaS Provider
  • Hourly local WordPress  backups stored on the server
  • Daily WordPress backups sent to Wasabi remote storage

Enterprise Package

  • Weekly complete server backups stored with IaaS Provider
  • Hourly local WordPress backups stored on the server
  • Daily WordPress backups sent to Wasabi remote storage
  • Monthly WordPress backups stored on a physical drive. 

Managed WordPress Hosting Support:

Teracore will apply weekly theme, plugin and core file updates.
Security updates will be applied as they become available.
We monitor the activity on your websites and schedule updates when traffic is low.
If a WordPress vulnerability is recorded on the Threatpress database (https://db.threatpress.com/) an automatic virtual patch is deployed to prevent the vulnerability from being exploited. The vulnerable software will be removed and replaced with a suitable, secure alternative.
AI assisted visual monitoring checks the site after an update and notifies our team if there is a > 3% layout shift the site is then visually checked and tested by a human.

Technical Support

Teracore can not provide support for Domain or DNS issues if these services were purchased from a 3rd party.

Email and 3rd party integration support

Teracore can not provide support for email accounts or 3rd party applications that were not purchased from Teracore.

Privacy policy and cookie consent

Websites hosted with Teracore are eligible for a iubenda privacy policy and cookie consent solution.
Teracore will work with the client to develop the privacy policy and cookie consent solution.
Teracore will appoint a data protection officer to ensure that the data you are collection from your website users and customers is accurately defined in your privacy policy but it the responsibility of the client to enforce the policy. Sensitive client information must not be shared insecurely and access will be provided on a need to know basis.

Service Credit Requests

All SLA claims must be filed in writing to support@teracore.co.za within 7 days of the incident. The support ticket must include all relevant information, including website name, a full description of the incident, and any logs (if applicable). All SLA credits will be issued as credits against future invoices for services.

In order to qualify for Service Credits, you must be current on all payment obligations, not be in violation of the Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy or any other policies and procedures of Teracore.

Total cumulative Service Credits during any given month shall not exceed your monthly fee for those Services affected.

Teracore proactively monitors network uptime, infrastructure uptime and hardware availability. The results of these monitoring systems shall provide the sole and exclusive determination of network uptime, infrastructure uptime and hardware availability.

Termination Clause

As long as you do not have any outstanding invoices, we will give you a backup of your website.
If you manage your domains, we will release them back to you.
If we provide your email hosting, we will release you from our reseller agreement, so that you can move to a new reseller, or manage it yourself.
Our agency license keys for premium WordPress themes and plugins will be deactivated when you migrate your site off our hosting.
You will have to purchase your own license keys to receive software updates for those themes and plugins.

Right to Modify

Teracore may modify any aspect of this SLA with or without prior notice. Should you wish to terminate the Service as a result of such modification, you may do so by sending a termination notice to Teracore any time prior to the effective date of such modification. Without a termination notice, the modified SLA shall apply from the effective date for as long as you continue to retain services from Teracore.