Legal
Service Level Agreement
Our 99.9% uptime guarantee, credit terms, support response targets, and maintenance policy.
📅 Last updated: May 7, 2026
📍 Governing law: State of Arkansas
Plain-English Summary: This document is written to be readable. We've included a summary at the top of each major section. If you have questions about anything here,
contact us — we'll explain it in plain language.
1. Uptime Commitment
Plain English: We guarantee your hosting account is available 99.9% of the time each month. If we fall short, you get account credit. Simple.
501 Servers LLC guarantees that all shared hosting, business hosting, and managed WordPress hosting accounts will be available and accessible 99.9% of the time in any given calendar month ("Service Uptime Guarantee").
99.9% monthly uptime allows for a maximum of approximately 43.8 minutes of downtime per month. Our actual historical performance targets are significantly higher.
2. Definitions
- Downtime: Any period during which your hosting account is inaccessible to visitors via HTTP/HTTPS due to server-side failure. Measured by 501 Servers's internal monitoring systems.
- Scheduled Maintenance: Planned maintenance periods, announced at least 48 hours in advance via email and the network status page. Scheduled maintenance is excluded from downtime calculations.
- Verified Outage: A downtime event confirmed by 501 Servers's monitoring infrastructure.
- Monthly Period: A calendar month (e.g., May 1–31, 2026).
3. Service Credits
If 501 Servers fails to meet the Service Uptime Guarantee in any given month, you are eligible to receive service credits as follows:
| Monthly Uptime Achieved | Service Credit |
|---|
| 99.0% – 99.9% | 10% of monthly hosting fee |
| 95.0% – 98.9% | 25% of monthly hosting fee |
| 90.0% – 94.9% | 50% of monthly hosting fee |
| Below 90.0% | 100% of monthly hosting fee |
Credits are applied to future invoices and do not expire. Credits may not be redeemed for cash.
4. Claiming Credits
To claim a service credit:
- Submit a request to billing@501servers.com within 30 days of the end of the affected month
- Include your account email address and a description of the outage
- 501 Servers will verify the claim against our monitoring records within 5 business days
- Approved credits will appear on your next invoice
Third-party monitoring reports (Pingdom, UptimeRobot, etc.) cannot be used as the sole basis for credit claims. Credits are determined by 501 Servers's internal monitoring data.
5. SLA Exclusions
The Service Uptime Guarantee does not apply to downtime caused by:
- Scheduled maintenance windows (48-hour advance notice provided)
- Customer-caused issues (misconfigured scripts, plugins, or applications)
- Attacks (DDoS) targeted specifically at the customer's account
- DNS propagation delays following domain configuration changes
- Third-party service failures (registrars, payment gateways, CDNs)
- Force majeure events (natural disasters, widespread internet outages)
- Customer's failure to maintain current payment (suspended accounts)
- Actions taken to enforce our Acceptable Use Policy
6. Support Response Times
| Channel | Hours | Target Response |
|---|
| Phone — hello@501servers.com | Mon–Fri, 9am–6pm CST | Live answer |
| Email — hello@501servers.com | 7 days/week | Within 4 hours |
| Support ticket | 7 days/week | Within 4 hours |
| Critical/emergency issues | 24/7 | Within 1 hour (phone) |
Response time targets are goals, not SLA guarantees. We strive to meet these targets consistently and have historically exceeded them.
7. Scheduled Maintenance
501 Servers performs routine maintenance on servers and infrastructure to ensure security and performance. We will:
- Provide at least 48 hours notice for planned maintenance affecting service availability
- Post maintenance windows on our Network Status page
- Send email notifications to affected customers
- Schedule maintenance during low-traffic periods (typically 2am–5am CST)
- Aim to complete maintenance within announced windows