Service Level Agreement
This SLA defines the uptime commitments, support response times, and credit terms for all Papa Bear Hosting server plans. Effective for all accounts active as of January 1, 2025.
1. Overview
Papa Bear Hosting (“PBH,” “we,” “us”) provides this Service Level Agreement to define our commitments to you (“Customer,” “you”) regarding service availability, support responsiveness, and remedies when we fall short. This SLA is part of your Master Services Agreement with Papa Bear Hosting.
We take these commitments seriously. If we miss them, you get credits automatically — no ticket required.
2. Uptime Guarantee
2.1 Monthly Uptime Commitment
Papa Bear Hosting guarantees 99.99% monthly uptime for all dedicated and managed server plans. This equates to no more than approximately 4.38 minutes of unplanned downtime per month.
| Monthly Uptime | Max Downtime/Month | Service Credit |
|---|---|---|
| 99.99% or above | ≤ 4.38 min | No credit (within SLA) |
| 99.9% – 99.98% | 4.38 min – 43.8 min | 10% of monthly fee |
| 99.0% – 99.89% | 43.8 min – 7.3 hrs | 25% of monthly fee |
| Below 99.0% | More than 7.3 hrs | 100% of monthly fee (1 month free) |
2.2 How Downtime is Measured
Downtime is calculated as the total number of minutes in a calendar month during which your server is unavailable, excluding scheduled maintenance windows. Availability is measured from our network monitoring systems, which check your server at 60-second intervals from three independent locations.
“Unavailable” means your server fails to respond to ICMP ping and HTTP health checks from all three monitoring locations simultaneously for two or more consecutive checks.
2.3 Exclusions
The following do not count toward downtime calculations:
- Scheduled maintenance (communicated at least 48 hours in advance)
- Emergency security patches (communicated as soon as practicable)
- Outages caused by customer actions, misconfiguration, or custom software
- Force majeure events (natural disasters, government actions, etc.)
- DDoS attacks exceeding our mitigation capacity (rare; >2 Tbps sustained)
- BGP routing issues beyond our upstream providers’ control
3. Support Response Times
Support response times vary by issue severity and plan tier. All times are measured from initial ticket submission or phone call initiation.
| Severity | Definition | Standard Plans | Pro & Elite Plans |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1 Critical | Server down / complete service loss | 15 min | 8 min |
| P2 High | Major service degradation, partial outage | 1 hour | 30 min |
| P3 Medium | Performance issues, non-critical features affected | 4 hours | 2 hours |
| P4 Low | General questions, non-urgent requests | 24 hours | 8 hours |
4. Credit Issuance Process
Service credits are calculated at the end of each calendar month based on monitoring data. Credits are automatically applied to your next invoice — you don’t need to open a ticket or request them.
You can review your monthly uptime reports in your client portal at any time. If you believe our monitoring data is incorrect, you may dispute it within 30 days by submitting supporting evidence (third-party monitoring logs, etc.) to [email protected].
Credits are non-transferable and have no cash value. They apply only to future invoices for the same service. Credits cannot exceed 100% of a single month’s hosting fee.
5. Scheduled Maintenance
Papa Bear Hosting performs scheduled maintenance during low-traffic windows, typically between 2:00 AM – 6:00 AM Eastern Time on weekdays. We post maintenance notices at least 48 hours in advance via:
- Email to your account’s primary contact address
- Status page at status.papabearhosting.io
- Support portal announcements
Emergency maintenance (security patches, hardware failures) may be performed with shorter notice when delay would cause greater harm.
6. Network & Hardware Guarantees
In addition to uptime, Papa Bear Hosting commits to:
- Network latency: <5ms intra-data center, <30ms to major US peering points
- Hardware replacement: Failed components replaced within 4 hours during business hours, 8 hours off-hours
- Storage integrity: All storage arrays monitored with proactive replacement at 85% SMART threshold
- Power redundancy: N+1 UPS, N+1 generator, dual PDU paths to every rack
7. Modifications to This SLA
We reserve the right to update this SLA with 30 days’ advance notice via email. If a change materially reduces your SLA protections, you have the right to terminate your service without penalty within that 30-day window.
Continued use of services after the effective date of changes constitutes acceptance of the updated SLA.
8. Contact & Escalation
For SLA disputes, billing credit questions, or escalation beyond standard support:
- General Support: [email protected]
- Billing & Credits: [email protected]
- Escalation: [email protected] (responds within 4 hours)
- Emergency: Use client portal P1 ticket for fastest response
Questions about this SLA? We’re happy to walk you through it. Contact our team — no automated responses, just real engineers who know what they’re agreeing to.