Service Level Agreement

EXPRESSION Service Levels

The Expression Service Level Agreement (“SLA”) is the policy governing the use of Expression (“XPR”) under the terms of the XPR Customer Agreement (“XPR Agreement”) between Expression and users of Expression services (“The Customer”).   XPR offers industry-leading service levels to host your web-based digital assets including websites, databases, code, applications and content.  XPR guarantees a minimum of 99.95% general availability for XPR services including network availability and system access.  Service levels are based on monthly availability and are backed by financially binding outage increments covering all XPR services used by the customer.

 

Definitions

“Monthly Uptime Percentage” is calculated by subtracting from 100% the percentage of minutes during the month in which XPR, as applicable, was “unavailable.” Monthly Uptime Percentage measurements exclude downtime resulting directly or indirectly from any XPR SLA exclusion (defined below). 

“Unavailable” is when XPR has no external connectivity or does not load within a reasonable amount of time (greater than 60-seconds within a 10-minute window).

A “Service Credit” is a dollar credit, calculated as set forth below, that we may credit back to an eligible account.

“Instance” means a single customer deployment supporting one or more customer domains.

“Total Instance Minutes” is defined as the aggregate amount of time all instances are running for a customer during a given month.

“Total Instance Downtime Minutes” is calculated as the sum of each XPR instance’s downtime minutes during the course o a month. 

“Accessible” means that the XPR instance could respond to network requests.

 

Service Commitment

XPR will use commercially reasonable efforts to make XPR available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage of at least 99.95%, in each case during any monthly billing cycle (the “Service Commitment”). In the event XPR does not meet the Service Commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit as described below.

 

Service Commitments and Service Credits

Service Credits are calculated as a percentage of the total monthly Subscription charges paid by you for XPR.

 

Monthly Uptime Percentage (%)

Credit to Bill for XPR

100% to 99.95%

NA

<99.95% to 99.9%

5%

<99.9% to 99.5%

10%

<99.5% to 99%

15%

<99%

20%

 

XPR will apply any Service Credits only against future XPR payments otherwise due from the customer.  At XPR’s discretion, XPR may issue the Service Credit to the credit card used to pay for the billing cycle in which the Unavailability occurred.  Service Credits will not entitle Customer to any refund or other payment from XPR.  A Service Credit will be applicable and issued only if the credit amount for the applicable monthly billing cycle is greater than one dollar and the account is not past due. Service Credits may not be transferred or applied to any other account.

 

Credit Request and Payment Procedures

To receive a Service Credit, customer must submit a claim directly to XPR through the customer ticketing system. To be eligible, the credit request must be received by us by the end of the first billing cycle after which the incident occurred and must include:

  1. the words “SLA Credit Request” in the subject line;
  2. the dates and times of each Unavailability incident that you are claiming;
  3. the affected XPR account (for example, the customer domain – www.yourdomain.com)

If the Monthly Uptime Percentage of such request is confirmed by us and is less than the Service Commitment, then we will issue the Service Credit to you within one billing cycle following the month in which your request is confirmed by us.  XPR reserves the right to withhold credit if it cannot verify the downtime or customer cannot show that they were adversely impacted in any way because of the downtime. 

 

XPR SLA Exclusions

This service agreement does not apply to any downtime, suspension or termination of XPR services:

  • That result in account suspension or termination due to breach of the customer agreement;
  • For non-payment or if the account is past due;
  • Caused by factors outside of XPR’s reasonable control, including any force majeure event, internet access, or related problems beyond the demarcation point of XPR related services running on Amazon Web Services;
  • That result from any actions or inactions of the customer or any 3rd-party; or
  • That result from your software, other technology, and/or 3rd-party equipment, software or other technology (other than those which are under XPR direct control);
  • That result from any actions or inactions of you or any 3rd-party including code deployments or publishing content out of XPR’s control;
  • That result from any maintenance as provided.

 

Monitoring

XPR believes in keeping track of our services and ensuring both their uptime and performance needs to be monitored. XPR currently connects to every XPR service instance every sixty (60) seconds to ensure network availability and site access for publishing website(s), application(s) and content.  Customers can request further monitoring and defined checks through the XPR sales team and dedicated reports of this enhanced monitoring that will be separately defined for customers that require it.

 

Data Backup and Redundancy

Business continuity is about designing, deploying and running your application in a way that it is resilient and mitigates planned (or unplanned) disruptive events that have the potential to result in the loss of your application’s or website’s ability to conduct its business function.  These events include human errors, permanent or temporary outages, or regional disasters that could cause wide scale loss of facility in a region. The goal of business continuity is for the customers application or website to continue to function during these events with minimal impact on the business function. XPR takes Business continuity seriously and has built in multiple contingencies to ensure applications run with as little disruption as possible as well as have the proper backups and processes in place to ensure a quick recovery. 

All XPR production environments are deployed in a redundant environment with no single points of failure.  XPR instances are backed up at regular intervals and can be rebuilt at any time.  If a customer uses more resources than allocated in the dedicated instance XPR will use the same logic and methodology to easily scale up additional resources. Additional resources will increase monthly cost of Customer’s XPR service using predetermined cost increases defined below. Databases, and where applicable data stores, are backed up at regular intervals defined below to XPR’s highly available backup repositories using 256bit AES encryption to ensure further data protection and availability.  In some cases, restoration of files or databases may incur a restoration fee depending on the time and urgency of the request. 

  • All XPR data backed up hourly, daily, monthly and will be retained up to three months.
  • Additional offsite backup options are available.
  • Partial restores are included as a complimentary service as part of the customer’s ongoing monthly maintenance fee.  If a restore is required due to incidents not related to Expression execution or Expression support staff, the customer will be assessed a fee of $125 per hour up to a maximum fee of $500 for restoration of customer’s data, website and/or application.   
  • All accounts include standard infrastructure 24/7 support and offers additional priority support options upon request.