Cloud Computing Maintenance, Outage Schedules and Policies
Cloud Computing Maintenance, Outage Schedules and Policies
Updated: October 10, 2009
Version: 1.2
Maintenance and Outage Policies
In order to operate your Services in an efficient and secure manner and to achieve the highest possible uptime to meet your contracted Service Level Agreements (SLAs), servers, network equipment, operating systems and applications require preventative maintenance, updates and upgrades. While this maintenance occurs frequently and in most cases will be transparent to you, some system maintenance will occasionally require a server to be taken off-line or to be rebooted.
To minimize downtime during peak traffic hours, our support staff will periodically take servers and network equipment off-line during scheduled off-peak periods. This document defines WatServ policy regarding the scheduling of network and server outage periods so that preventative maintenance can be performed.
Four types of outages are defined as follows:
1) Regular Scheduled Outages: Downtime necessary for updates and patches requiring reboots or restarts. Regular Scheduled Outages periods are detailed in the charts below. These Outages should be considered routine and will not be communicated further to the customer unless there is a potential impact on services or applications.
2) Extraordinary Scheduled Outages: Downtime necessary for more significant application updates or changes to facilities, networks, or other supporting infrastructure. This type of outage will be communicated to the affected customers via their contact email address a minimum of 48 hours notice prior to the outage. The impact will be discussed with the customer and based on the customers feedback these activities may be rescheduled.
3) Emergency Scheduled Outages: Downtime necessary for emergency activities. An example of this type of outage would be a critical patching to prevent a large scale virus outbreak, application patches affecting performance or stability, etc. This type of outage will be communicated to the effected customers via their contact email address a minimum of 12 hours prior to the outage and a schedule time will be agreed upon.
4) Emergency Unscheduled Outage: Downtime required addressing issues so severe requiring immediate attention. This type of maintenance is inherently not scheduled and is only performed in extreme circumstances. We will make our best effort to notify customers should this become necessary.
Every effort will be put forth by WatServ to ensure that servers are taken off-line in a manner that will minimize interruption of connectivity and access to network and server resources. WatServ will make a reasonable effort to advise WatServ customers as far in advance as possible of any and all predicted extended outages.
This policy includes but is not limited to: shared servers and accounts, semi-dedicated servers and accounts, dedicated servers and accounts, all managed network equipment, and managed Applications.
This policy excludes: WatServ administrative websites such as billing and support.