Service Level Agreement

Plain-language summary; the legal text governs if the two ever differ.

What is this?

This is the everyday version of our Service Level Agreement (SLA) for jdswebservice.com. It says what we promise about uptime for our hosted client sites, the client portal, and our analytics, what does not count against those promises, and what we do when something breaks. The formal legal version is the one that counts if the two ever say different things.

The short version

We promise that our hosted client sites, the client portal, and our analytics are up for at least 99% of every calendar month. We measure that ourselves with our own automated monitoring, which checks every covered system around the clock. Maintenance and things beyond our control do not count against the promise. There are no automatic credits on this page; remedies follow the agreement each client signs. If something goes down, we restore it first and explain it after.

Who this covers

• "JD's Web Service" is a sole proprietorship in Pennsylvania that runs the site. We say "we," "us," and "our."
• "You" here means a client with a signed service agreement (what our terms of service call a "Signed Service Agreement").

Covered systems

• The promises in this agreement cover your hosted website, the client portal at clients.jdswebservice.com, and our self-hosted analytics.
• The analytics count because they run on the same infrastructure as your site, and the portal's Analytics page shows your visitor data from there. One promise, one number.
• Demo and lead-mockup sites are not covered; they are pre-sales illustrations, and demos are clearly marked as demos. The public jdswebservice.com site is not covered either; it follows the terms of service.

The promise; how we measure it

• Every covered system works for at least 99% of each calendar month.
• We measure it ourselves: our own automated monitoring checks each covered system's public address around the clock, and availability is counted as a percentage of each calendar month.

Example: a 30-day month has 43,200 minutes. One percent of that is 432 minutes, about 7 hours and 12 minutes. At 99%, a covered system can be unavailable up to that long in a 30-day month (counting only what the list below counts, since excluded things do not count against the number) before we miss the 99% promise.

Maintenance

• We keep maintenance windows short, and they usually fall overnight.
• We announce our own maintenance through the portal and by email at least 24 hours ahead when practical.
• Urgent maintenance (security or repairs) can start without warning; we announce it as soon as we reasonably can. That includes maintenance our infrastructure provider schedules on its side.
• All maintenance sits outside the promise (see the next section).

What does not count against the promise

None of these count as downtime:

• Planned maintenance we told you about.
• Short urgent maintenance for security or repairs, announced as soon as practical, including maintenance our infrastructure provider schedules.
• Problems caused by you, or by content or changes you directed.
• Times when your services are suspended or blocked under your signed agreement or the terms of service (which can happen for any reason at all whatsoever, as the terms state for site access).
• Failures or slowdowns of things we do not control: domain registration and DNS, content delivery through our content-delivery network, internet carriers between your visitors and our network, email delivery, and payment processing (such as Stripe).
• Traffic-flood and other attacks beyond the network's usual defenses, and other malicious acts.
• Force majeure (events beyond anyone's control).
• Anything else outside our reasonable control.

One naming note: your site is served through Cloudflare's global content-delivery and DNS network, and issues with delivery outside our own systems are excluded from the commitment wherever they happen.

If a commitment is missed

• There are no automatic credits on this page.
• When a promise here is missed, we keep monitoring, restore the service, and record what happened.
• Any remedy, adjustment, or credit is determined under your Signed Service Agreement. That is where the money mechanics live.

Outages; how to report a problem

• If your site is down or not working as it should: email [email protected] or submit a change request in your portal.
• We begin work as soon as we know about it.
• When an outage happens, we restore the service first and put together an explanation afterwards as soon as we can.
• No response or turnaround clock is promised for outages on this page.

While we build your site

• Your progress page on the dashboard gets updated as milestones are reached.
• We give our best estimate of the schedule. Any timeline we state is an estimate, not a guaranteed delivery date.
• If delays happen, they get explained.

Support and change requests

• Your plan includes ongoing support.
• Change requests go in through the portal and are tracked through to completion.
• How requests are handled, and what turnaround applies, follows your Signed Service Agreement, which carries the plan you chose.

Protecting your site and its data

• We take reasonable protective measures for the systems that run your site.
• After any outage outside the promise, we restore your site as best we can.
• Personal data, and data rights requests (including California and European GDPR routes), follow the Privacy Policy: the contact form with a "privacy request" note. This page opens no second request route.

Payments, credits, refunds, and cancellation

• Your Signed Service Agreement governs payments, credits, refunds, and cancellation.
• Our Payment Policy and Cancellation Policy are the public descriptions of what the contract provides on those subjects. The rule stays the same: the client contract superseeds all payment policy or cancellation policy terms that are public if there are terms that differ within the client contract.

Changes take effect immediately

• We can change this agreement at any time. The change starts working the moment we post it.
• That is our house rule for every legal document we publish.

Disputes

• Pennsylvania law governs this agreement.
• If a dispute comes out of this page's subject, both sides first try good-faith mediation. If it is still open 60 days after mediation starts, either side can file in the state courts in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
• Real service disputes stay under your Signed Service Agreement, which controls.

Contact

• Outage reports: [email protected] or a change request in your portal.
• Anything else about this page: [email protected].

Related documents

• Terms of Service (/terms, formal version /terms/legal): governs the site and defines the Signed Service Agreement.
• Privacy Policy (/privacy, formal version /privacy/legal): how we handle personal data, and your data rights.
• Clients: the signed agreement wins wherever it differs about the services; the money section above shows how the Payment and Cancellation policies sit under it.