Service Level Commitment
Effective July 24, 2026 · Digital Network Designs LLC
Contents
This document states what we commit to for hosting clients, and equally importantly, what we do not. It applies to hosting and maintenance clients in good standing and forms part of our Terms of Service.
We are a small shop. We have written this to describe what we can actually deliver rather than what sounds impressive. A provider advertising 99.99% with a 15-minute response at any hour is either much larger than us or not being honest with you.
1. Uptime target
We target 99.9% monthly availability for hosted websites, measured as the percentage of the calendar month during which a site responds normally to automated checks from our monitoring system.
99.9% works out to roughly 43 minutes of unavailability in a 30-day month.
What does not count against the target
- Scheduled maintenance announced in advance (section 3).
- Emergency maintenance needed to address an active security threat.
- Failures of systems we do not control: your domain registrar, DNS providers you manage, upstream network carriers, third-party APIs, payment gateways, or CDN services.
- Outages caused by your own code, plugins, applications, or content, including a site taken down by a plugin update you applied.
- Suspension under our Acceptable Use Policy or for non-payment.
- Traffic exceeding your plan's resources, or attacks directed at your specific site.
- Force majeure events beyond our reasonable control.
2. Service credits
If we miss the uptime target in a calendar month, you may request a credit against your next invoice:
- 99.0% to 99.9%: 10% of that month's hosting fee.
- 95.0% to 99.0%: 25% of that month's hosting fee.
- Below 95.0%: 50% of that month's hosting fee.
To claim a credit, email support@digitalnetworkdesigns.com within thirty (30) days of the end of the affected month, with the approximate dates and times of the outage. Credits apply to hosting fees only, not to design work or third-party costs, and are capped at 100% of one month's hosting fee.
Service credits are your sole and exclusive remedy for failure to meet the uptime target. If we miss the target in three consecutive months, you may terminate hosting without penalty and receive a pro-rata refund of prepaid fees.
3. Maintenance windows
Routine maintenance is performed where possible between 11:00 PM and 5:00 AM Central Time, when traffic to East Texas business sites is at its lowest. Most maintenance causes no visible interruption.
Where an interruption is expected, we give at least forty-eight (48) hours' notice by email. Emergency maintenance addressing an active security vulnerability may be performed without notice; we will tell you as soon as practical afterwards.
4. Support response times
These are targets for our first substantive response, not for resolution. Complex problems take as long as they take.
| Severity | Meaning | Target response |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | Site down or inaccessible; security compromise | 4 hours, any day |
| High | Major function broken — forms, checkout, email | 1 business day |
| Normal | Content edits, minor issues, questions | 2 business days |
| Low | Enhancements, non-urgent requests | 5 business days |
Business hours are Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Central, excluding federal holidays. Automated monitoring runs continuously, and we often begin work on an outage before anyone reports it. Critical issues should be emailed to support@digitalnetworkdesigns.com with "URGENT" in the subject line.
5. Backups and restoration
- Full backups are taken daily.
- Backups are retained on a rolling schedule of at least thirty (30) days.
- Backups are stored separately from the production server.
- Restoration from backup is available on request at no charge for hosting clients, normally completed within one business day.
Backups are a recovery measure, not a guarantee. Backup systems fail, and a backup taken after a problem occurred contains the problem. Keep your own copy of anything you could not stand to lose — original photographs, logo source files, written content. If you need us to send you a copy of your site, ask; we will.
6. What is included in hosting
- Server administration, patching, and security updates at the operating system and web server level.
- SSL certificate issuance, installation, and automatic renewal.
- DNS record management.
- Uptime monitoring.
- Daily backups and restoration on request.
- Server configuration changes on request: redirects, MIME types, cache headers, custom error pages.
Not included in hosting alone
- Content changes and new page creation (covered by a maintenance plan, or billed hourly).
- Design work and new features.
- Updates to applications, plugins, and themes you control, unless you have a maintenance plan.
- Cleanup of a site compromised through outdated software you were responsible for updating. We will quote this work.
- Third-party costs: domain registration, premium plugins, stock imagery, paid APIs.
7. Outage notification
For an outage we expect to last more than thirty minutes, we notify affected clients by email with what we know and an estimate of restoration time, followed by confirmation once service is restored. For significant incidents we will tell you what caused it and what we changed to prevent a recurrence. We would rather explain a mistake than pretend it did not happen.
8. Changes
We may update this commitment with at least thirty (30) days' notice to hosting clients. If a change materially reduces what we commit to, you may terminate hosting without penalty and receive a pro-rata refund of prepaid fees.