Service Level Agreement
The short version
- This SLA covers our Managed Services only (Starter, Growth, Business and Enterprise). It backs them with measured uptime targets and account credits if we miss.
- Self-Managed Services (Lite, Plus, Pro) are self-managed and best-effort — no uptime guarantee and no service credits.
- Resold Email (Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace) lives in your own tenant and is governed by Microsoft’s or Google’s SLAs, not this one.
- Uptime targets: Starter 99.9%, Growth 99.95%, Business 99.99%, Enterprise 99.99% (99.995% available on a bespoke Order Form).
- If we miss the target in a calendar month, you can claim an account credit of 10% to 100% of that service’s monthly fee, based on how much qualifying downtime occurred.
- You claim by opening a ticket in the Client Area to [email protected] within 30 days of the affected month.
- If a Managed Service misses its target three calendar months in a row, you may terminate it without penalty and get a pro-rata refund of prepaid fees.
This summary is for convenience only. The numbered clauses below are the binding agreement.
1. Introduction and scope
This Service Level Agreement (the “SLA”) describes the availability commitments that Maxinodes (“we”, “us”, “our”) makes to the Customer (“you”, “your”) for our Managed Services, and the service credits we provide if we do not meet them. It forms part of, and should be read together with, our Terms of Service. Capitalised terms used but not defined here have the meaning given to them in the Terms of Service.
This SLA applies only to Managed Services — our managed hosting plans Starter, Growth, Business and Enterprise, which we operate on your behalf. The following are expressly out of scope and carry no uptime guarantee and no service credits under this SLA:
- Self-Managed Services (the self-managed plans Lite, Plus and Pro) are provided on a best-effort basis only. We maintain the underlying platform, network and facilities with care, but Self-Managed Services are managed by you, carry no SLA, no uptime target and no service credits. Nothing in this SLA creates any availability commitment for Self-Managed Services.
- Resold Email (Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace mailboxes resold by us and hosted in your own tenant) is not hosted on Maxinodes infrastructure and is not covered by this SLA. Its availability is governed by the service levels, terms and data-processing agreements of Microsoft or Google, as applicable. We do not provide credits for Resold Email under this SLA.
Our infrastructure for Managed Services is operated from enterprise data centres in the Netherlands, with encrypted backups stored within the EU/EEA only and no transfer of hosted service data to third countries.
2. Definitions
In addition to the defined terms in the Terms of Service, the following definitions apply to this SLA:
- “Monthly Uptime Percentage” means, for a given Managed Service in a given calendar month, the percentage calculated as:
Monthly Uptime Percentage = (Total Minutes in the Month − Downtime Minutes) ÷ Total Minutes in the Month × 100
where “Total Minutes in the Month” is the total number of minutes in that calendar month, and “Downtime Minutes” is the total number of minutes of Downtime (counting only qualifying Downtime Periods, as defined below) in that month. - “Downtime” means any period during which a Managed Service is Unavailable.
- “Unavailable” means a total loss of network reachability to your Managed Service that is caused by infrastructure within Maxinodes’ control. For the avoidance of doubt, a Managed Service is not Unavailable, and the following do not count as Downtime: application-layer errors (including HTTP 4xx and 5xx responses, application crashes, slow responses or database errors), and any loss of reachability caused by your configuration, your code, or components under your control.
- “Downtime Period” means a period of consecutive minutes during which the Managed Service is Unavailable. Only a Downtime Period of at least 5 consecutive minutes is counted toward Downtime Minutes; isolated interruptions shorter than 5 consecutive minutes are disregarded for the purpose of calculating the Monthly Uptime Percentage.
- “Measurement source”: availability is measured by our monitoring systems, which are the authoritative source for determining the Monthly Uptime Percentage and any Downtime. Incidents are also communicated on the Status Page (status.maxinodes.com), but the Status Page is a communications channel and is not the measurement source.
3. Uptime commitment
For each Managed Service, we commit to the Monthly Uptime Percentage set out below, measured per calendar month. The “approximate allowed downtime” column is illustrative, based on a 30-day month, and is provided for guidance only; the binding figure is the Monthly Uptime Percentage.
| Managed Service tier | Monthly Uptime Percentage | Approx. allowed downtime (30-day month) |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | 99.9% | ~43 minutes |
| Growth | 99.95% | ~21 minutes 36 seconds |
| Business | 99.99% | ~4 minutes 19 seconds (counted only via the 5-minute Downtime Period floor) |
| Enterprise | 99.99% standard; 99.995% available on a bespoke Order Form | ~4 minutes 19 seconds at 99.99%; ~2 minutes 10 seconds at 99.995% |
For the Business tier, because only Downtime Periods of at least 5 consecutive minutes are counted, a single qualifying Downtime Period will already exceed the ~4 minutes 19 seconds illustrative allowance; the commitment is therefore met by avoiding any qualifying Downtime Period in the month. A higher Enterprise commitment of 99.995% is available only where it is expressly agreed in a bespoke Order Form for that Enterprise service.
All fees referenced in this SLA are exclusive of VAT. Maxinodes Ltd is not currently VAT-registered, and no VAT is charged on our prices.
4. Service credits
If the Monthly Uptime Percentage for a Managed Service in a calendar month falls below the applicable target in clause 3, you are entitled to an account credit, calculated as a percentage of the monthly fee for that affected Managed Service for that month. The credit percentage is based on the cumulative qualifying Downtime (the total Downtime Minutes from qualifying Downtime Periods) for that Managed Service in that calendar month:
| Cumulative qualifying Downtime in the calendar month | Account credit (% of that service’s monthly fee) |
|---|---|
| Target missed, with up to 4 hours of Downtime in total | 10% |
| More than 4 hours and up to 8 hours | 25% |
| More than 8 hours and up to 24 hours | 50% |
| More than 24 hours | 100% |
Service credits are issued as account credit only, applied against future invoices for the affected Managed Service. The total credit for any single Managed Service in any single calendar month is capped at 100% of that service’s monthly fee for that month. Credits are calculated separately for each affected Managed Service and do not aggregate across services or across months.
5. How to claim a credit
Service credits are not applied automatically. To claim a credit, you must submit a claim by opening a ticket in the Client Area addressed to [email protected] within 30 days of the end of the affected calendar month. Your claim must include:
- the affected Managed Service’s service ID (as shown in the Client Area);
- the dates and times of each period you believe was Downtime; and
- the duration of each such period.
We will review your claim against our monitoring systems and confirm any credit due. If you do not submit a valid claim within 30 days of the end of the affected month, you forfeit the credit for that month.
6. Exclusions
The uptime commitment in clause 3 and the service credits in clause 4 do not apply to, and the following periods do not count as Downtime:
- Scheduled maintenance for which we have given at least 24 hours’ notice (see clause 8);
- Emergency security maintenance reasonably required to protect the security or integrity of the Services or Customer Data;
- Customer fault — any unavailability caused by your acts or omissions, your code, your applications, your configuration or misconfiguration, or your failure to follow reasonable instructions;
- Customer-controlled components — operating systems, software, plugins, frameworks or other components that are under your control or selected by you;
- Third-party and upstream issues — failures of third-party networks, upstream transit providers, DNS, or other infrastructure beyond our network demarcation point;
- Force majeure — events beyond our reasonable control, including natural disasters, war, civil unrest, government action, labour disputes, and epidemics or pandemics;
- Beta or preview features — any feature or service identified as alpha, beta, preview, trial or experimental;
- Denial-of-service attacks — downtime resulting from denial-of-service or distributed denial-of-service (DoS / DDoS) activity to the extent it exceeds any mitigation contracted for the affected Managed Service;
- Suspension — any period during which the Managed Service is suspended in accordance with our Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy, including suspension for breach of the AUP or for non-payment.
7. Incident response
The following are operational commitments we make in addition to, and separate from, the service-credit calculation in clauses 3 and 4. They are not used to compute credits and a failure to meet a response target does not, by itself, create an additional credit entitlement.
- Monitoring: we monitor Managed Services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- On-call: our on-call engineer is paged automatically when a monitoring threshold is breached.
- Initial response target: we target an initial response within 15 minutes for Business and Enterprise services, and within 1 hour for Starter and Growth services.
- Communication: for customer-impacting incidents, we aim to post an update to the Status Page (status.maxinodes.com) within 30 minutes of detection, and to keep it updated as the incident progresses.
- Post-mortem: for any customer-impacting incident lasting more than 30 minutes, we publish a public post-mortem within 5 business days of resolution.
Support for incident handling is available in English and Russian every day; monitoring and on-call paging operate around the clock.
8. Maintenance
Planned maintenance is announced at least 7 days in advance, typically scheduled for low-traffic windows of 02:00–05:00 CET at weekends, and limited to approximately 30 minutes per event where customer impact is expected. Planned maintenance for which at least 24 hours’ notice has been given is excluded from Downtime under clause 6.
Emergency maintenance — for example, to apply an urgent security fix — may be carried out with shorter notice or, where strictly necessary to protect the Services or Customer Data, with no advance notice. We will keep emergency maintenance as brief as reasonably possible and communicate it on the Status Page.
9. Chronic outage — right to terminate
If a single Managed Service fails to meet its applicable Monthly Uptime Percentage target (clause 3) for three consecutive calendar months, you may terminate that affected Managed Service without penalty by giving us notice via the Client Area. On such termination, we will refund, on a pro-rata basis, any prepaid fees for the unused remainder of the then-current term of that affected service. This right is in addition to any service credits already due for the relevant months and is separate from your general cancellation and refund rights under the Terms of Service.
10. Sole and exclusive remedy
Except for the termination right in clause 9, the service credits set out in this SLA are your sole and exclusive remedy for any failure by us to meet the uptime commitment in this SLA. Service credits have no cash value, are applied only as account credit against future invoices, and are non-refundable and non-transferable.
Nothing in this clause or in this SLA limits, excludes or affects the mandatory statutory rights of a Consumer. Where you are a Consumer, your statutory rights under Irish and EU law remain fully available to you regardless of the remedies described here, and the “sole and exclusive remedy” limitation above does not apply to the extent it would reduce those mandatory rights. For the avoidance of doubt, the 30-day money-back guarantee and the statutory 14-day Consumer right of withdrawal described in our Terms of Service are separate from, and not limited by, this SLA.
11. Changes to this SLA
We may update this SLA from time to time, for example to reflect changes to our Managed Services, our monitoring, or applicable law. Where a change materially reduces the uptime commitments or credit entitlements for a Managed Service you have already ordered, we will give you reasonable advance notice through the Client Area or by email before it takes effect. The version in force is always the one published at this URL, and the Status Page and legal hub link to the current version. Your continued use of the Managed Services after a change takes effect constitutes acceptance of the updated SLA, without prejudice to any mandatory statutory rights you have as a Consumer.
Contact
SLA credit claims and questions: [email protected].
By post: Maxinodes Ltd, 1 Ballycoolin Road, Dublin 15, Ireland.