Steadfast Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Solutions for Critical Business Operations

Steadfast understands how important reliability and available are to your business, so we have spent considerable time and money to make available one of the most reliable systems available. These dependable systems are then backed by one of the best support teams in the industry, allowing us to offer an industry leading 30 Minute (Or Less) Support SLA. This has been accomplished by the following:

• True 24x7 in-house support by experienced systems engineers
• Redundant routers and switches
• Multiple upstream carriers and service providers
• Redundant power infrastructure
• UPS and generator power backup
• All key network, environmental, and electrical components are monitored 24x7
• Pro-active monitoirng and management of internal systems
• Strict change management policies (SOC 1/SSAE 18 audited)
• Industry's strongest SLAs

Industry Leading 30 Minute (Or Less) Support Response Time SLA

Unlike most providers, our support response SLA applies to all support tickets, not just emergency tickets. We treat all tickets as urgent.

No matter what the severity or urgency of a request is, an initial response will be provided by an individual on our support team to a support ticket (submitted to the Support department of our Help Desk at https://support.steadfast.net or via support@steadfast.net) within 30 minutes. This is measured from the minute your ticket is initially received by our system, the ticket is created, and a ticket number is issued. You will be sent an email with this ticket number and the ticket will be visible in the Help Desk. If you do not have a ticket number, a ticket has not been created. Should a support ticket go longer than 30 minutes without an initial response the client will be entitled to an account credit of 5% of the Monthly Recurring Costs of the primary service the ticket is for. This SLA does not apply to duplicate or inappropriate tickets and must be submitted by an authorized contact on the account.

99.99% Total Service Availability SLA

Steadfast will use commercially reasonable efforts to provide 99.99% availability (ability to maintain external connectivity, electrical power, or perform disk operations as applicable to your specific services) of all redundant services. Customers can opt for lower levels of service, with less redundancy, that provide a reduced SLA. All reduced redundancy services  (such as servers not in a high availability cluster or colocation services not using redundant network and power connectivity) come with a 99.9% availability SLA. Should a service be unavailable for more than the time allowed by the SLA in a given billing month, the client is entitled to an account credit of 10% of the Monthly Recurring Costs of the impacted service. If availability goes below 99% that credit is increased to 35% and if it goes below 95% the credit is increased to 100%. Failover system or other systems used only for redundancy purposes or custom ordered servers are not covered by the SLA.

The (Not So) Fine Print

To request an SLA credit, email billing@steadfast.net from an authorized contact on the account with the services (a service is a specific line item or service ID) affected, the date and time the incident started, and the date and time the incident was resolved. Please supply any applicable ticket numbers as well as any other evidence to demonstrate the incident. The SLA request must be made within 30 days of the incident.

Accounts must not be past due when requesting an SLA credit. Account credits are issued to your account to be used for future service and will be automatically applied to newly created invoices. Refunds will not be issued, except at the sole discretion of Steadfast. Credits are issued only for the directly impacted services and not for other related services, including software. These credits are your sole and exclusive remedy for any performance or availability issues for your services under the Agreement and this SLA. SLA credits will not exceed 100% of the client's Monthly Recurring Costs for the impacted services for the month in which the incident occurred.

The Service Level Agreement does not cover incidents due to:

• Factors Outside Our Reasonable Control - This includes things such as natural disaster, war, acts of terrorism, riots, government action, network or device failure external to our data centers, or hardware, services, or software not provided and supported by Steadfast.
• Scheduled or Emergency Maintenance - Major upgrades or maintenance to networks or facilities to maintain long term availability and functionality are occasionally required. These maintenances will be kept to a minimum and should rarely cause complete outages. Such maintenance will be broadcast to all customers in advance via the web page at https://support.steadfast.net/News/List and outages will not exceed 1 hour per month or 5 hours per calendar year.
• Software/Server Maintenance - If certain software or hardware upgrades must happen to your specific configuration this information will be communicated to the designated contacts on your account to schedule this work to be completed at a time convenient to you.
• Client Action/Error - An action caused or requested by the client (or an agent of the client) that results in unavailability such as turning off a port/system, changing a setting/configuration, failing to update contact information, failing to take action requested by Steadfast, or using the system outside of the stated scope.
• Security Breaches/Attacks - If you do not purchase the appropriate levels of security services, such as firewalls and DDoS Protection, attacks from outside sources against the client environment can cause downtime or outages outside of Steadfast’s control. Additionally, restricting network access may become necessary to prevent other users from being impacted.
• Legal Action - The client is expected to follow all laws and regulations to which Steadfast is bound. Steadfast will comply with all laws and legal orders.
• Violation of Client Agreement - Service can be interrupted if the client does not meet the terms of a signed agreement, such as failure to make required payments.