This agreement is part of the Terms & Conditions and says what we commit to on availability, what we do not, and what you get when we fall short. It applies to every paid hosting plan.
A service level agreement is only worth what it is measured against, so the state of every machine we run is published on our status page, written down by an automated check rather than typed in by us after the fact.
What we commit to
| What | Target |
|---|---|
| Your game server reachable at its connection address | 99.9% per calendar month |
| The control panel and its API | 99.9% per calendar month |
| Network availability at the datacentre | 99.9% per calendar month |
99.9% of a 30-day month is about 43 minutes of unavailability. We aim for considerably better than that and usually achieve it; the number is the floor at which you are entitled to something, not the target we work to.
How availability is measured
Availability is measured per calendar month, per server, from our own monitoring, which checks each machine's reachability on a short interval and records what it finds whether or not anybody is looking.
A server counts as unavailable when it cannot be reached at its connection address for reasons within our control, measured from the first failed check to the first successful one afterwards. Downtime is counted in whole minutes.
A server does not count as unavailable because it is running slowly, because your game is crashing, or because a check could not be completed — a monitoring failure tells us nothing about your server, and we do not treat “we could not ask” as either up or down.
What is excluded
Time does not count towards the commitment where it results from:
- Scheduled maintenance, announced at least 48 hours beforehand. We keep this rare and put it in the quietest window we can find for the region.
- Emergency maintenance to fix a security problem or prevent imminent failure. We tell you as soon as we can, which is sometimes afterwards.
- Anything you did — a configuration that will not boot, a resource that crashes the server, a full disk, a database dropped by somebody with the permission to drop it, a plan whose limits you have exhausted.
- The game, its updates, its mods and its scripts. A breaking update to the game platform is not a hosting fault, though we will help you through it.
- Suspension under the Acceptable Use Policy or for non-payment.
- Denial of service attacks beyond the capacity of the mitigation in place at the datacentre. We buy protection and it works most of the time; an attack large enough to saturate an upstream is not something we can be liable for.
- Events genuinely outside our control — upstream network failures, datacentre power or cooling loss, natural disaster, war, a change in the law, or a failure at a third party such as the payment processor or the DNS provider.
- Your own connection, or a routing problem between you and the datacentre that does not affect reachability generally.
Service credits
Where monthly availability for your server falls below the target, you are entitled to a credit against your account, calculated on that server's monthly fee:
| Availability in the month | Credit |
|---|---|
| 99.9% or better | None — the commitment was met |
| 99.0% to 99.9% | 10% |
| 95.0% to 99.0% | 25% |
| 90.0% to 95.0% | 50% |
| Below 90.0% | 100% |
Credit is applied to your account and comes off your next invoice. It is not paid in cash, is not transferable, and is not refundable. It is capped at 100% of that server's fee for the month concerned, and it is the exclusive remedy under this agreement — which does not affect your statutory rights, or your right to a refund under the Refund Policy where a failure was serious enough to warrant one.
Credits count towards the overall liability cap in the Terms & Conditions rather than sitting alongside it, and this agreement gives no remedy beyond them.
This agreement applies to paid plans in good standing. It does not apply to free, trial, promotional or beta services, to a server that is suspended, or to an account with an overdue invoice — a month in which any of those was true does not earn a credit.
How to claim
Write to support@ghostnode.gg within 30 days of the end of the month concerned, with the server and the dates and times you were affected. A claim made after that window is not payable — we need to be able to check it against monitoring data while it still exists. We check it against our own monitoring and apply the credit, usually the same day.
We do not apply credits automatically, and we would rather be honest about why: our monitoring knows a machine was unreachable, but it does not always know which customers that actually cost something. Asking takes one email and we do not make it difficult.
If we cannot fix it
Where a server is unavailable for more than 48 consecutive hours for reasons within our control, you may cancel that server immediately and take a pro-rata refund of the unused period, in addition to the credit for the month. You do not have to wait out a term you cannot use.
What this agreement is not
It is not a guarantee of latency — every latency figure we show is labelled as an estimate, because the route between you and a datacentre is largely not ours.
It is not a data protection or backup guarantee. Backups and snapshots exist and work, and the Terms & Conditions explain why they are still not a substitute for keeping your own copy.
It is not a promise about the game platform itself, which we do not write and do not control.
Changes
If we change these commitments to your disadvantage we will give 30 days' notice by email, and you may cancel in that period and take a pro-rata refund. Improvements take effect straight away.
GhostNode Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales, company number 17414337. Registered office: 66 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4NA, United Kingdom. General enquiries support@ghostnode.gg; anything about personal data dpo@ghostnode.gg.