Service Level Agreement

1. Overview

This Service Level Agreement ("SLA") describes the uptime commitments IT Trust makes to clients of its VPS hosting services and the remedies available when those commitments are not met. This SLA is incorporated into and forms part of our Terms of Service.

2. Uptime Commitment

IT Trust commits to 99.9% monthly uptime for the underlying virtualisation infrastructure and network connectivity to your VM. This equates to a maximum of approximately 43 minutes of unplanned downtime per calendar month.

Uptime is measured as the percentage of time in a calendar month during which your VM is reachable via its assigned IP address, excluding scheduled maintenance and excluded events listed in Section 5.

3. Scheduled Maintenance

IT Trust may perform scheduled maintenance on its infrastructure from time to time. We will provide at least 48 hours' advance notice via email for maintenance that is expected to result in VM downtime or degraded performance.

Where possible, scheduled maintenance will be performed between 22:00 and 06:00 SAST on weekdays, or at any time on weekends. Scheduled maintenance windows do not count against the 99.9% uptime commitment.

4. Incident Response

When a service incident is detected or reported, IT Trust targets the following response times:

• Critical (complete VM inaccessibility): Initial response within 1 hour; resolution target 4 hours
• High (significant performance degradation): Initial response within 2 hours; resolution target 8 hours
• Medium (partial service impact): Initial response within 4 hours; resolution target 24 hours
• Low (minor issues, no service impact): Initial response within 1 business day

Response times are measured during South African business hours (08:00–17:00 SAST, Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays) unless the incident is classified as Critical, in which case response targets apply 24/7.

To report an incident, email sales@ittrust.co.zawith a description of the issue, your account email, and your VM's IP address.

5. Exclusions

The following are excluded from uptime calculations and do not qualify for SLA credits:

• Scheduled maintenance communicated with at least 48 hours' notice
• Downtime caused by your actions, including misconfiguration, software errors, or accidental deletion
• DDoS attacks or other malicious traffic directed at your VM or IP address
• Failures caused by third-party services outside IT Trust's control (e.g. PayFast, upstream ISPs)
• Force majeure events including natural disasters, power grid failures, or government actions
• Suspension of your service due to an AUP or Terms of Service violation
• Issues arising from software or configurations you installed or modified on your VM

6. Service Credits

If IT Trust fails to meet the 99.9% monthly uptime commitment for reasons not excluded under Section 5, you are entitled to a service credit applied to your next billing cycle:

• 99.0% – 99.9% uptime: 5% credit of that month's fee
• 95.0% – 98.9% uptime: 10% credit of that month's fee
• Below 95.0% uptime: 25% credit of that month's fee

Service credits are your sole remedy for uptime failures and do not entitle you to a cash refund. Credits will not exceed 25% of your monthly fee in any single month and do not carry over to future months.

7. How to Claim a Credit

To claim a service credit, email sales@ittrust.co.za within 14 days of the end of the affected calendar month. Include your account email, the dates and times of the downtime, and a brief description of the impact. IT Trust will review the claim against our monitoring records and respond within 5 business days.

8. Client Responsibilities

This SLA covers the infrastructure layer — the hypervisor, storage, and network connectivity to your VM. IT Trust does not guarantee the availability or performance of:

• The operating system or applications running inside your VM
• Services you expose to the internet (web servers, databases, etc.)
• Data integrity — you are responsible for maintaining your own backups

9. Changes to This SLA

IT Trust may update this SLA from time to time. Material changes will be communicated via email with at least 14 days' notice. Continued use of our services after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the revised SLA.

10. Contact

For service incidents or SLA queries, contact us at sales@ittrust.co.za.