Service Level Agreement

Kinetic Hosting works to keep customer hosting services available around the clock. This Service Level Agreement (“SLA”) explains when an interruption qualifies for account credit and how to submit a claim. It forms part of the agreement described in our Terms of Service.

This SLA applies to paid Kinetic hosting services unless an order or product-specific SLA expressly states otherwise. It does not promise that a service will never experience an interruption, and it does not replace any statutory remedy that must be available to a consumer.

“Qualifying Downtime” is an unplanned period during which the hosted service is unavailable because of a fault in infrastructure or systems for which Kinetic is responsible. The service must fail reasonable network checks, such as ping or an appropriate TCP-port test, from Kinetic monitoring or more than one independent external location.

Downtime begins when our monitoring detects the interruption or when sufficient evidence shows that it began, whichever is earlier. It ends when the service is reasonably reachable again. Brief or intermittent failures that form part of the same underlying incident may be treated as one continuous incident where that fairly reflects the customer impact.

A failure of Kinetic-managed hardware, networking, power or platform software normally counts as Qualifying Downtime. Degraded performance counts only where it makes the service effectively unusable, rather than merely slower than usual.

An incident becomes eligible for credit once Qualifying Downtime exceeds 10 consecutive minutes. For every complete hour of Qualifying Downtime after those first 10 minutes, you may claim credit equal to 5% of the affected service's monthly recurring charge, up to 100% of that monthly charge.

If one continuous incident lasts for more than 24 hours, you may claim an additional credit equal to 50% of the affected service's monthly recurring charge. The maximum credit for one service in one billing month is therefore 150% of its monthly recurring charge.

For a service billed on another interval, we calculate the credit using its equivalent monthly recurring charge. One-off fees, setup fees, dedicated IP charges, taxes, account credit and third-party licences are not included in that calculation.

Credits are added to your Kinetic billing account and may be used against future invoices. They are not normally paid as cash and cannot create a negative invoice balance, except where mandatory law requires another remedy. A credit under this SLA does not prevent us from offering a larger discretionary credit or refund.

Maintenance announced at least 24 hours in advance is Planned Maintenance and does not count as Qualifying Downtime during the announced window. We will use reasonable efforts to schedule work to minimise disruption and to describe the affected services and expected duration.

If announced maintenance materially exceeds its stated window, the excess period may count as Qualifying Downtime unless another exclusion applies. A general or indefinite maintenance notice does not create an unlimited exclusion.

Emergency Maintenance is urgent work that cannot reasonably wait, such as installing a critical security fix or preventing imminent infrastructure failure. We will give as much notice as reasonably practicable, with a target of 15–30 minutes where circumstances allow.

The first 30 minutes of a genuine emergency-maintenance event do not count as Qualifying Downtime. Any outage beyond 30 minutes may qualify unless the continued interruption is covered by another exclusion. We will provide status updates where reasonably practicable.

Time does not count as Qualifying Downtime to the extent it is caused by:

• your configuration, files, actions or failure to follow reasonable technical instructions;
• a plugin, mod, game, application or other third-party software not managed by Kinetic;
• an internet, DNS or local-network problem that does not affect the Kinetic service itself;
• a DDoS attack or other malicious activity that could not reasonably be prevented, while we take proportionate steps to mitigate it;
• lawful suspension under the Terms of Service, including non-payment, abuse or an urgent security risk;
• Planned Maintenance or the limited Emergency Maintenance allowance described above;
• a customer-requested migration, restart, reinstall, upgrade or other agreed work;
• a widespread event genuinely outside our reasonable control, where we take reasonable steps to reduce its impact; or
• an inability to access an optional panel feature where the underlying hosted service remains reasonably usable.

A third-party supplier, datacentre or upstream network being involved does not automatically exclude a claim. We will consider whether the event was genuinely outside our reasonable control and whether Kinetic took reasonable steps in selecting, monitoring and responding to that supplier.

We may temporarily disable a specific panel or platform feature to contain a fault or security issue. If the underlying hosted server remains usable, that feature restriction does not normally count as downtime. If the restriction makes the paid hosting service effectively unusable, it may qualify under section 2.

Open a billing ticket within 30 days after the incident ends. Include the affected service, approximate start and end times, the impact experienced and any useful evidence. You do not need to provide information already available in our monitoring or incident records.

We will assess the claim reasonably using Kinetic monitoring, status information, logs and credible customer evidence. A claim will not be rejected merely because our own monitor failed to record an incident. We may reject materially false or fraudulent claims and may take proportionate action under the Terms of Service where fraud is established.

We aim to decide straightforward claims within 10 business days. Approved credit will be applied to the billing account associated with the affected service. If you disagree with a decision, you may ask the billing team to review it and provide any additional evidence.

SLA credit compensates for qualifying availability incidents. Refund and cancellation rights are addressed separately in the Terms of Service. We will not provide duplicate compensation for the same amount of loss, but applying SLA credit does not require you to waive a statutory right or a claim that cannot legally be excluded.

We may update this SLA in accordance with the change provisions in our Terms of Service. Material changes will receive reasonable advance notice and will not retrospectively reduce a valid claim arising before the change took effect.

Questions or claims can be submitted through our billing ticket system or sent to contact@kinetichosting.com.