1. The commitment
In plain terms: 99.9% availability per calendar month, on every plan, including the cheapest one.
Polar Host commits to making each service available at least 99.9% of the time in every calendar month. That allowance works out to roughly 43 minutes of downtime per month.
The commitment is the same on Cub as it is on Polar and on every VPS size. We do not sell uptime as an upgrade.
This SLA forms part of our Terms of service and applies to customers whose account is in good standing.
2. What counts as downtime
In plain terms: Your service not answering from the public internet, measured from outside our network.
A service is down when it fails to respond to valid requests from the public internet for two or more consecutive minutes, as observed by at least two of our independent external monitoring locations.
Downtime for a month is the total of those minutes. Availability is (total minutes in the month − downtime minutes) ÷ total minutes in the month.
Each service is measured separately: your shared hosting, each VPS, email, DNS, and the control panel each have their own figure.
Our monitoring is the record of truth, and the 90-day history on our status page comes from it. If your own monitoring disagrees with ours, send us the data and we will investigate.
3. What does not count
In plain terms: Announced maintenance, your own code, and things genuinely outside our control.
- Scheduled maintenance announced at least 72 hours in advance on the status page and by email. We aim for under two hours a month and schedule it between 01:00 and 05:00 local time for the region.
- Emergency maintenance to patch an actively exploited vulnerability, announced as far ahead as the situation allows.
- Downtime caused by your own application, configuration, code deployment, or resource exhaustion within your plan.
- Suspension for non-payment or for a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy.
- Problems with your domain registrar or with DNS you host elsewhere.
- Failures of networks between your visitors and our edge that are outside our control.
- Force majeure: natural disaster, war, general strike, or government action.
4. Service credits
In plain terms: The worse the month, the bigger the credit — up to 100% of that month's fee.
If we miss the commitment, you receive a credit against the affected service, calculated as a percentage of that service’s monthly fee:
- 99.9% to 99.0% — 10% credit
- 99.0% to 98.0% — 25% credit
- 98.0% to 95.0% — 50% credit
- Below 95.0% — 100% credit
For yearly plans, the monthly fee is one twelfth of what you paid. For hourly VPS billing, it is the monthly cap for that server size.
5. How credits are applied
In plain terms: Automatically, on your next invoice. You do not have to file a claim.
We calculate credits from our own monitoring within five business days of the end of each month and apply them to your next invoice. No ticket, no claim form, no deadline to miss.
Credits are applied to your account balance rather than refunded to your card, and they do not carry a cash value. Credits in a month never exceed 100% of that month’s fee for the affected service.
If you believe a credit was missed, tell us within 30 days of the invoice and we will recheck the numbers.
6. Incident communication
In plain terms: Status page inside 15 minutes, updates every 30, and a written post-mortem for anything over an hour.
When we detect an incident affecting customers, we post it to the status page within 15 minutes and update it at least every 30 minutes until it is resolved.
For any incident lasting more than an hour, we publish a post-mortem within five business days: what happened, why, what we did, and what we changed so it does not happen again. We name the cause even when the cause was us.
Service credits are the sole remedy for failing to meet this SLA, as set out in the Terms of service.