Terms of Service

This Hosting Service Level Agreement (SLA) applies to clients that have contracted for web hosting or web services from RPS Studios & GorillaWP.

As used herein, the term “Web Services Availability” means the percentage of a particular month that the content of a client’s web service is available for access by third parties via HTTP and HTTPS, as measured by RPS Studios.

Service Level

RPS Studios’ goal is to achieve a minimum of 99.9% Web Service Availability for all clients.

Subject to the Exceptions section below, if the Web Service Availability of client’s web service is less than 99.9%, RPS Studios will issue service credit days to clients in accordance with the following schedule.

Web Service Availability Remedy Credit Percentage:

Exceptions

Client shall not receive any credits under this SLA in connection with any failure or deficiency of Web Service Availability caused by or associated with:

1. circumstances beyond RPS Studio’s reasonable control, including, without limitation, acts of any governmental body, war, insurrection, sabotage, 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 (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;
2. failure of access circuits to the RPS Studios data center network, unless such failure is caused solely by RPS Studios;
3. scheduled maintenance and emergency maintenance and upgrades;
4. DNS issues outside the direct control of RPS Studios;
5. issues with FTP , POP , IMAP or SMTP client access;
6. false SLA breaches reported as a result of outages or errors of any RPS Studios measurement system;
7. client’s acts or omissions (or acts or omissions of others engaged or authorized by client), including, without limitation,
8. custom scripting or coding (e.g., CGI, Perl, HTML, ASP, etc), 
9. any negligence, willful misconduct, or use of the services in
10. e-mail or webmail delivery and transmission;
11. DNS (Domain Name Server) Propagation;
12. outages elsewhere on the Internet that hinder access to your account. RPS Studios is not responsible for browser or DNS;
13. caching that may make your site appear inaccessible when others can still access it. RPS Studios will guarantee only those areas considered under the control of or contract by RPS Studios: RPS Studios server links to the Internet and RPS Studios servers.

Problem Escalation

All emergency reports concerning web service availability, outages or other conditions that broadly affect the client’s services shall be reported by email.

All problem reports will be submitted by client employees to [email protected]. Email reports flow immediately into RPS Studios’ support channel. In the event that the client’s services are inaccessible for a period of more than four (4) hours during operational business hours, RPS Studios will arrange for a conference call with client staff members to discuss the situation and plan for recovery.

Credit Request and Payment Procedures

In order to receive a credit, the client must make a request by sending an email message to [email protected]. Each request in connection with this SLA must include client’s name and the dates and times of the unavailability of client’s web service and must be received by RPS Studios within ten (10) business days after client’s web service was not available. If the unavailability is confirmed by RPS Studios, credits will be applied within two billing cycles after RPS Studios’ receipt of the client’s credit request.

Notwithstanding anything to the contrary herein, the total amount credited to client in a particular month under this SLA shall not exceed the total hosting fee paid by client for such month for the affected services. Credits are exclusive of any applicable taxes charged to client or collected by RPS Studios and are client’s sole and exclusive remedy with respect to any failure or deficiency in the Web Service Availability of client’s web services.

Backups

The server control panel backs up the website nightly and stores the backups for 30 days on external Wasabi Cloud Storage buckets. Daily backups are stored for 30 days and can be restored by emailing [email protected], or by requesting a server control panel login for your team to access.

Maintenance

RPS Studios’ support and maintenance services will provide ongoing support in the form of troubleshooting and resolving any issues that arise over the life of the contract in regards to the servers performance and the application(s) running thereon. We will also ensure that your hardware, server software and your websites WordPress core and plugins are regularly updated and patched to guarantee consistent performance and security. During regular WordPress maintenance, if an update to a plugin or version of WordPress require updates to the website, this would be outside the scope of the hosting agreement and would fall back to our standard development fees in order to fix the issue. If there is a concern of updates breaking the live site we can first test the updates on a staging environment, which would incur an additional $30/month hosting maintenance fee. If our vulnerability scanner finds an issue in the WordPress core or plugin an update will be applied as soon as a fix is released. If there is a larger issue this would be outside the scope of this agreement and we will work with the client to resolve the issue. An example of a larger issue could be a plugin that is no longer supported and thus needs to be replaced.

The nightly server software maintenance window is scheduled for 1AM PST. This often results in a quick server reboot. If you plan to run your own uptime monitor we recommend allowing up to a 10 minute outage from 1:00-1:10AM.