
Service Level Agreement
Service Level Agreement
What we commit to once your site is live. 99.5% uptime with service credits applied automatically when we miss it, response windows by priority, and what support covers on each care level.
On this page · 9 sections
Uptime
We commit to 99.5% availability, measured monthly, for every site we host.
To be concrete about what that means: 99.5% allows for approximately 3 hours 39 minutes of unavailability in a 30-day month. We aim considerably higher and typically achieve it; 99.5% is the number we are prepared to put credits behind.
How it is measured
By independent third-party monitoring, checking your site at regular intervals from outside our network. A site is treated as unavailable when the monitor cannot load it and the failure is confirmed by a second check. Availability is calculated per calendar month.
We will provide the monitoring report for any month on request, including a month where we met the commitment.
What is excluded
Time is not counted against the commitment where unavailability is caused by:
- Scheduled maintenance, announced in advance as set out below
- Failures outside our infrastructure, your domain registrar, DNS you control, a third-party CDN you have placed in front of the site, or the wider internet
- Third-party services embedded in the site, a booking widget, a chat tool, a payment provider, a font or script host
- Changes you or a third party make, an edit, a plugin installed by someone else, code pasted into the site, credentials shared and misused
- Suspension for non-payment, in accordance with the Terms
- Events beyond reasonable control, including attacks of a scale that exceeds commercially reasonable mitigation, and failures at the underlying data center
Where an outage has more than one cause we will tell you honestly what happened, including when the cause was ours.
Response times
Four priorities. We set the priority based on impact, not on how the request was worded, and if we get it wrong, tell us and we will change it.
| Priority | What it covers | Acknowledged | Work begins |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emergency | Site down or unreachable. Checkout failing. Suspected security incident or compromise. | Within 1 hour any hour, any day | Immediately |
| Urgent | Something wrong and visible to your customers, a broken form, a dead button, a wrong price, a closure that needs posting today. | 4 business hours | Same or next business day |
| Normal | Everyday changes within your allowance, copy, photos, small tweaks. | 1 business day | 2–3 business days |
| Scheduled | Purchased blocks of work, planned changes, anything you have asked us to do on a date. | 1 business day | Within 5 business days |
Emergency response does not vary by plan. A Marquee client at $50 a month whose site is down gets the same response as a Growth client. If the site being up is the floor, then getting it back up has to be the floor too.
Business hours are Monday to Sunday, 9:00am to 9:00pm Eastern. Emergencies are outside that, call, any hour.
How to reach us, by priority
| Priority | How to reach us |
|---|---|
| Emergency | +1-248-205-6977. Do not email and do not use the change request form. They are not monitored overnight. |
| Everything else | The change request process, or the project thread. How to send a request |
What support covers
Included
- Anything broken, a form that stopped sending, a page erroring, layout broken after an update, a plugin conflict. Always free, never counted against your allowance, never queued.
- Core, theme and plugin updates, and fixing anything an update breaks
- Backups, restores and recovery
- SSL and certificate management
- Security monitoring, and cleanup if the site is compromised through no fault of yours
- Small content changes within your allowance
- Advice. Asking us a question is not billable.
Not included
- New pages beyond your pattern library, new features, new integrations, redesigns, quoted separately
- Content writing beyond small edits
- Problems caused by changes made by you or a third party. We will fix them, and it comes out of your allowance or is quoted.
- Third-party platform failures. We will help you chase them, but we cannot fix Google’s outage
- Training beyond the handover walkthrough, though we will usually send a short screen recording rather than charge you
- Recovery of data you deleted more than 90 days ago
Work included, by plan
This is where the plans genuinely differ.
| Monthly | Changes we make for you | Ongoing work included | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marquee | $50 | None included. You manage your own content. Structural work is $175 for up to one hour, quoted first. | The floor above. Nothing ongoing. |
| Presence | $250 | 1 request per month, up to 20 minutes | Listing and uptime monitoring |
| Foundation | $500 | 2 requests per month, up to 30 minutes each | Monthly local search work, citation maintenance, rank tracking, monthly report |
| Growth | $1,000 + 20% of ad spend | Within your support hours | All of the above, plus advertising management, lead scoring, automation and revenue reporting |
Growth support hours
Support hours on Growth scale with advertising spend.
| Monthly ad spend | Hours per month |
|---|---|
| Paused, or seasonal off | 6 |
| $3,000, the minimum | 8 |
| $5,000 | 10 |
| $10,000 | 12 |
| $15,000 | 14 |
| $20,000 and above | 16 |
Beyond your allowance
$350 for up to two hours, scheduled within five business days. $175 for up to one hour on Marquee. Always quoted and approved before work starts, never invoiced afterwards.
Allowances do not roll over. They are capacity held for you each month rather than credit. If you have been saving up small changes, send them.
The floor: what every plan includes
This does not vary by what you pay. There is no tier at which your site is less protected, less monitored or less backed up.
- Managed hosting on infrastructure we operate
- Content delivery network
- SSL certificate, issued and renewed automatically
- Web application firewall, DDoS protection and malware monitoring
- Daily backups with 90-day retention
- Core, theme and plugin updates, tested before they are applied
- Uptime monitoring
- Spam protection on forms
- Licenses for every tool we run across all clients, at no additional charge
- Built and tested to WCAG 2.2 AA before launch, on every build
- The uptime commitment and emergency response below
What the plans differ on is the amount of work included, changes we make for you, and ongoing marketing activity. Not the safety of the site.
Maintenance
Routine updates are applied on a staging copy first and moved to the live site outside peak hours. Most cause no interruption at all.
Where planned work will make a site unavailable, we give at least 48 hours notice, schedule it between 10:00pm and 6:00am Eastern where possible, and keep it as short as we can.
Emergency security patching may need to happen immediately without notice. We will tell you as soon as it is done and explain what it was.
Your side of it
A few things we need from you for the above to hold:
- Tell us early. We monitor uptime, but we cannot see a form that has silently stopped sending. If something looks wrong, say so the same day.
- Keep your contact details current. If we cannot reach you during an incident, the response time above becomes theoretical.
- Do not install plugins or paste code. It is the most common cause of a site breaking, and it is the one thing on this page entirely within your control.
- Keep what you publish accessible. We hand the site over meeting WCAG 2.2 AA and we will show you how to keep it there. Pages you add later are yours: an uncaptioned video, an image with no alt text or a low-contrast button undoes it, and we cannot warrant content we did not build. Ask us and we will check anything before it goes live.
- Keep your account in good standing. These commitments apply while your care plan is active and current.
Service credits
If we miss the commitment in a given month, you get a credit against that month’s care fee.
| Monthly availability | Credit on the monthly fee | Roughly, in downtime |
|---|---|---|
| 99.5% or above | None, the target is met | up to 3h 39m |
| 99.0% to 99.49% | 10% | up to 7h 18m |
| 98.0% to 98.99% | 25% | up to 14h 36m |
| 95.0% to 97.99% | 50% | up to 36h |
| Below 95.0% | 100% | more than 36h |
Credits are applied automatically. You do not have to notice, ask, or file anything. If we miss it, we tell you and the credit appears on your next invoice.
A credit in any month is capped at that month’s care fee. Credits are applied against future invoices rather than paid out in cash.
Changes to this agreement
We may update this document. Where a change reduces a commitment we will give at least 30 days notice, and you may cancel within that period without penalty if you do not accept it.
Something down right now?
Call any hour, any day. Do not email and do not wait for business hours. For everything else, the response windows above are the commitment and we measure ourselves against them.
Related documents
Black Tiger Digital · Waterford, Michigan · Mon to Sun, 9am to 9pm ET