CenturyLink SLA:
Hosting Solution

Updated: February 26, 2019

1. Introduction

This Service Level Agreement (“SLA”) for Hosting Solution sets forth the service levels (“Service Levels”) for the eligible combination of hosting related services (“Hosting Solutions”) provided to Customer within a Data Center. This SLA is subject to and incorporated into the Agreement and the applicable Service Schedule(s) between the parties and any terms not defined in this SLA shall have the meaning set forth therein.

In the event of a Service Level Failure, Customer may be entitled to receive the applicable service credit set forth herein (“Service Credits”).

2. Eligibility

A Hosting Solution (or “Service”) is eligible for the Service Levels set forth in Section 3 if it consists of at least one Managed Service from each of the following categories: Hosting, Firewall, Load Balancer/SSL Acceleration, Storage and HAN, that is purchased together as an integrated solution approved in writing by CenturyLink and maintained with Full Redundancy as set forth herein.

Hosting Solutions that do not meet the eligibility criteria or Hosting Solutions that are changed and no longer meet the eligibility criteria will not be entitled to this Hosting Solution Service Level. In the event that the Customer’s Hosting Solution loses eligibility for this Hosting Solution SLA, then the CenturyLink Managed Hosting SLA will be applicable to the Customer’s Services. For avoidance of doubt, any Service Credits provided hereunder shall not be combined with the CenturyLink Managed Hosting SLA.

The Hosting Solution add-ons of Managed Applications and CenturyLink Network (as each is described herein) are not required under this SLA but may be added to the solution by mutual written agreement and once added, provided there is Full Redundancy, they are deemed part of the Hosting Solution and subject to this SLA.

3. Service Levels

An eligible Hosting Solution is provided with an Availability Service Level of 99.9% per calendar month. If Customer’s entire Hosting Solution is subject to an Outage, a Service Level Failure shall be deemed to occur and Customer will be entitled to a Service Credit as follows:

% Availability
(per Calendar Month)
Cumulative Outage
(per Calendar Month)
Service Credit
(% of Hosting Solution MRC)
< 99.89% - ≥ 99.80% > 43.20 minutes – ≤ 1.44 hours 5% credit
< 99.80% - ≥ 99.50% > 1.44 hours – ≤ 3.6 hours 10% credit
< 99.50% - ≥ 99.25% > 3.6 hours – ≤ 5.4 hours 20% credit
< 99.25% - ≥ 99.00% > 5.4 hours – ≤ 7.2 hours 30% credit
< 99.00% > 7.2 hours 50% credit

Service Credits shall be calculated on only those Managed Services that form part of the affected Hosting Solution.

4. Process

Customer must request any Service Credit due hereunder by submitting an e-mail to billing.department@centurylink.com within sixty (60) calendar days of the conclusion of the month in which the Service Level Failure(s) occurs. Customer waives any right to Service Credits not requested within this sixty (60) calendar day period. Service Credits will be issued once validated by CenturyLink and applied toward the invoice which Customer receives no later than two (2) months following Customer’s Service Credit request. All performance calculations and applicable Service Credits are based on CenturyLink records and data unless Customer can provide CenturyLink with clear and convincing evidence to the contrary.

5. Limitations

The applicable SLA provides Customer's sole and exclusive remedies for any Service interruptions, deficiencies, or failures of any kind. To clarify, such sole and exclusive remedies shall not apply to breaches of unrelated obligations under the Agreement such as infringement, confidentiality, etc. A Service Level Failure shall not occur, the SLA, including any remedies hereunder, will not apply and Customer will not be entitled to receive a Service Credit in the case of an Excluded Event. The Service Credits offered in this SLA shall not be combined with any other CenturyLink SLA for the Services covered herein. Customer will not be eligible to receive any otherwise applicable Service Credits if Customer is in breach or default under any provisions of the Agreement at the time the Service Level Failure(s) occurred or at the time when such Service Credit is requested by Customer until such breach is cured, at which point the Service Credits will be applied. The Service Credits set forth herein are not cumulative and in no event will the Service Credits accrued in any calendar month exceed, in the aggregate across all events, fifty percent (50%) of the MRC for the affected Hosting Solution.

6. Definitions

“Availability” means the monthly percentage of time during a calendar month without an Outage. Availability is expressed as a percentage and calculated as follows:

[Total minutes in the relevant calendar month
(minus periods of scheduled and/or emergency maintenance)
– Cumulative total minutes of Outage in such month]
/ [Total minutes in such month
(minus periods of scheduled and/or emergency maintenance]
x 100

“Customer Data” means the data and applications that are owned or licensed by the Customer and reside on the Systems.

“Data Center” means the facility in which the Systems are located.

“Excluded Event” means any event that adversely impacts the Service that is caused by (a) the acts or omissions of Customer, its employees, customers, contractors or agents; (b) the failure or malfunction of equipment, applications or systems not owned or controlled by CenturyLink; (c) inconsistencies in the environment or unavailability of the Service results from changes in the Customer’s source environment, including either intentional or accidental connections or disconnections to the environment; (d) Force Majeure events; (e) scheduled and/or emergency maintenance; (f) any suspension of Service pursuant to the Agreement; or (g) the unavailability of required Customer personnel, including as a result of failure to provide CenturyLink with accurate, current contact information.

“Failover Group” means a group of Symphony Dedicated Nodes where Symphony Dedicated Instances are allowed to transfer between Symphony Dedicated Nodes should a hardware failure occur.

“Firewall” means one of the following CenturyLink services: Dedicated Firewall set up in failover configuration; or Virtual Firewall Service.

“Full Redundancy" means a design co-certified by Customer and CenturyLink engineered to have no single points of failure.

“High Availability (HA)” means that active hardware elements will fail over to standby hardware elements in the case of failure, with minimal system downtime.

"Hosting Area Network" (or "HAN") means the collection of switches, routers and other network-based devices that are managed by CenturyLink and which collectively provide data transport within the Data Center to the Managed Hosting Services.

“Hosting” means any/all tiers of one of the following CenturyLink services: Utility Compute with redundant non-High Availability servers; Symphony Dedicated with more than one Node and Failover Group; Intelligent Hosting with redundant servers; or Foundation Hosting with redundant servers and all local hard drives must be in a RAID 1 or 5 configuration.

“Hosting Solution MRC” means the monthly recurring charges applicable to an eligible Hosting Solution, which is an integrated combination of individual component services meeting the criteria set forth above.

“Load Balancer/SSL Acceleration” means one of the following CenturyLink services: Managed Dedicated LB/SSL; or Virtual Services LB/SSL.

“Maintenance Windows” are posted here and are subject to change at any time.

“Managed Applications” means one of the following CenturyLink services: Managed MS-SQL Database with Managed Clustering; or Managed MySQL; provided that database transactions that were in queue or transit for replication but were not committed to the replicant database prior to the failover request are excluded.

“Managed Services” means those services where CenturyLink provides and manages the relevant equipment.

“Network” means connectivity provided via a CenturyLink Application Transport Service.

“Node” is defined to mean a server.

“Outage” means the accumulated time in a calendar month during which Customer or its End Users are unable to establish a Session with the Systems or access Customer Data as tracked in a CenturyLink trouble ticket. SLA credits are based on cumulative Outages over a calendar month. Outages do not include any unavailability due to (a) a doubling of data transmitted above the committed data transmission rate specified in the most recent Order Form for the Customer if the committed rate is in excess of 10 Mbps; (b) failures caused by Customer Data; (c) data unavailability caused by ongoing restoration of data from a tape backup system unless such restoration is required due to a failure of CenturyLink; (d) any action on the part of a third party not performing authorized work on behalf of CenturyLink that results in network or equipment outage (including, but not limited to, viruses, trojan horses, denial of service attack(s) and/or worms); or (e) any Excluded Events.

“Service Credit” means an amount deducted from fees billed to Customer in the event of a Service Level Failure.

“Service Level Failure” means CenturyLink’s performance for a particular Service fails to meet the applicable Service Level set forth in this SLA.

"Session" means the ability to create a remote terminal connection to a managed operating system through which administrative commands can be executed for Intelligent Hosting, Symphony Dedicated and Utility Compute. For Foundation Hosting, a Session means the ability to create a connection to the HP iLO user interface through which administrative commands can be executed.

“Storage” means Utility Storage with dual paths and multi-path software functioning for automatic failover, but does not include the availability of the connected NAS Connect host servers or the medium to which they are connected.

"Systems" is the computer equipment and software that is provided by CenturyLink and leased to the Customer by CenturyLink and contains the Customer Data.