What we commit to
We target 99.9% monthly uptime for your websites, and we would rather explain exactly what that means than hide behind a number.
1. What "uptime" means here
It means your website answers requests from the public internet. We measure it continuously from outside our own network, so we are not marking our own homework.
99.9% over a month allows for roughly 43 minutes of unavailability. That is our target, and we work to beat it.
2. What our architecture does and does not do
You should know this before you buy, not after something goes wrong.
8Deploy runs on hardware we own and operate, in a single location. It is not a multi-region platform with automatic failover between data centres. If the machine suffers a serious hardware failure, your site is down while we replace it, and that can take longer than 43 minutes.
What protects you is not redundancy, it is discipline: continuous monitoring, backups taken every day and held off the machine, and engineers who answer immediately. If your business needs multi-region failover, buy a multi-region platform. We will tell you that plainly rather than sell you something that does not do what you need.
3. What is not counted as downtime
- Planned maintenance, which we announce in advance and schedule for quiet hours.
- Problems in your own site or code, including a plugin that takes the site down or a deployment that breaks it.
- Your site exceeding the resources of your plan. The panel warns you before this happens.
- Suspension for non-payment or for a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy.
- Failures of things we do not control, such as your domain registrar, your DNS provider if it is not us, or a general internet outage.
4. Maintenance
Most of our maintenance causes no interruption at all. Where a restart is genuinely needed, we announce it beforehand and do it in the quietest window we can find. We do not take the platform down during business hours for something that could have waited.
5. Support
| What has happened | When we respond |
|---|---|
| Your site is down | As fast as we humanly can, at any hour |
| Something is broken but the site is up | Within one business day |
| A question or a request | Within two business days |
The assistant in your panel answers most hosting questions instantly, at any hour, and it can see your actual account. For everything else there is a person, and it is usually the person who built the thing you are asking about.
6. If we let you down
If we miss our uptime target in a month because of something that was our fault, write to us and we will credit your account fairly for the disruption. We would rather settle that sensibly with you than bury a formula in a document nobody reads.
7. Backups, which matter more than uptime
Downtime is inconvenient. Data loss is fatal. We back up your sites, databases and mailboxes automatically, we hold copies off the machine they came from, and you can download a full copy yourself at any time. See our Data Retention Policy for how long we keep things.
8. Contact
Something wrong? [email protected].