art71 - Service Level Agreement

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Availability is very important for your website or email accounts so our Service Level Agreement (SLA) is designed to protect you against unreasonable downtime in our service. The art71 Servive Level Agreement (SLA) offers you a high level of availability for both websites and email delivery.

Our service availability

art71 work with RackSpace to provide you with a resiliant network for the running of your website and email accounts. Our contract with RackSpace started August 2007 and our up-time has been:

August 2007 to present

Website availability: greater than 99.999%
Email access: 100.0%

Prior to our contract with RackSpace, we had operated managed web servers continuously from October 2000 so we have considerable experience in maintaining websites 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, every day of the year.

October 2000 to July 2007 - 82 months

Website availability: greater than 99.9%
Email access: 99.8%

We aim to supply a 99.9% or higher availability for both web page and email access (that means less than 100 seconds per day down-time although, in reality, our recent down time has averaged just a few seconds per day). In any month in which your account suffers availability below our target we will refund your monthly fee for the affected website.

Our response to your enquiries

art71 understands that a rapid response to make changes to your website or a request for technical information can be critical to your work. To help us please, where possible though, send short emails or text messages and make sure you include as much useful information such as direct links to specific pages.

art71's response to emails: art71 aims to process and answer 70% of all client emails within 4 hours and 99% within the same day, Monday to Saturday. If the work requested involves more than 1 day's work, we will still acknowledge 99% of all emails within the same day with a suggested time schedule for the work requested.

art71's response to SMS text enquiries: art71 aims to process and answer 70% of all client SMS text messages within 4 hours and 99% within the same day, Monday to Saturday.

art71's response to telephone enquiries: art71 aims to return 99% of calls within the same day, Monday to Saturday. art71 understands that some issues are best discussed by phone but it is recommended you email or text to request a call back for faster service. As we do not operate call centres we are often unable to answer the phone and please consider using email or text to request a call-back for faster response. I am always happy to phone you back to discuss your website. :-)

How our billing operates

art71 issues one annual invoice for running your primary websites. This invoice is re-negotiated at its anniversary. Additional work involving the creation of new pages or functions is then billed at the end of the month in which the additional work was requested at a rate agreed between us. Large and complex websites have a monthly invoice for additional work which would have been agreed at the start of the project or is part of our historic agreement of working together.

What is included in our annual invoice for running your website?

• Registration fees for all domain names which we have agreed are included in the contract. After October 2007, you will not receive any invoices for payment of registration fees for domain names managed by art71 - they have all been included in the annual fee.
• Email accounts on all domain names managed by art71. You can choose to have emails delivered to another email address, configured for collection by your computer, configured to be delivered to your office mail server or collected directly from the website. Please visit our help page on emails for more information
• Hosting of your website with our partners RackSpace as described in our Service Level Agreement above. While our invoice does impose certain limits, in reality, all clients have, within reasonable limits, unlimited server space and unlimited data transfer.
• Email technical support on almost anything relevant to running the websites. Political discussion, linguistic challenges and anything else challenging also welcome!
• Text and image changes for existing pages. Pages which need constant update will have a Content Management System (CMS) added which allows you to update the page as you require.
• Accessibility re-coding. By 2008, we hope to have finished ensuring that all art71 websites conform fully to the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 and coding guidelines laid down by the W3C. This means we can be confident that the websites are usable by all and that the next generation of web browsers such as TV and cellphone-based systems will work fully.
• Control page access which will be fully launched during 2008 giving you as the website owner access to logged messages, orders, site visitor analysis and interactive web software.
• Security. A major upgrade during 2007-2008 involves working towards greater security for the websites to prevent intruders accessing sensitive data or slowing the server down by running unwelcome software.
• User feedback. You are finally encouraged to send any feedback from users of the website to help improve, not just your website, but also other websites managed by art71. The Web is a rapidly changing platform and your experience can help us to develop all our websites in the future towards web n.0 ...smart, intelligent, responsive websites.