Specific Service Level Agreements

EnCirca provides a variety of services with specific Service Level Agreements for each section. 

EnCirca Support

• Support phone and live chat hours are Mon – Fri, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm EST
• Leave an email message 24/7 at support@encirca.com
• We strive to answer your helpdesk tickets within 1 business day
• Calls are answered within 4 hours on business days
• Knowledgebase articles available at helpdesk.encirca.com

EnCirca Website

Overall

• Our website is online 24/7
• Scheduled maintenance is performed after hours to avoid disruption of services
• We strive to alert customers via our blog or put a banner on our site during planned and unplanned downtimes

Domain Management

• Scheduled maintenance on our account management system is done weekly on Thursdays, after normal business hours to avoid disruption of services
• If emergency maintenance is needed, we do so asap
• We strive to contact customers via email if their account is specifically affected
• We abide by the ICANN Terms for Registrars. These include specific mandates for: 
  • Registrant’s Rights; https://www.encirca.com/rights/
  • Abuse Complaints – https://www.encirca.com/abuse/
  • Expiration Processes – https://www.encirca.com/legal/expiration/
  • SLA’s from Law Enforcement
• In certain cases, Registries may suspend a domain. We will let customers know as soon as we decide to take this action.

Shared Hosting and Email

• https://www.deluxe.com/policy/shared-hosting

Secure VPS Hosting

• Provides a 99.99% uptime SLA for virtual private servers.
• EnCirca takes weekly snapshots of each site as backup.
• There are different kinds of maintenance that our vendor sometimes need to do that have differing maintenance windows and allowed time for action.
• In each case customers are notified by email regarding the maintenance listing the affected droplets, the reason for the maintenance, what the possible impact may be, and whether or not any action will be taken on the specific virtual servers.
• Some maintenance, such as network, do not require the virtual servers to be shutdown in anyway, while others like migrating to a new hypervisor do. On occasion this means that the VM will be powered down and then migrated to another hypervisor – we also do port checking before and after, to make sure that the open listening ports prior to the migration are once again open and listening after.

DNS

The standard maintenance window is on Thursday from 9:00pm – 4:00 am. Most planned downtime will occur during this window. Any other planned downtime will be scheduled during the nights and weekends and with consultation with customers

Our DNS availability goal is 99.9% of the time during the defined service hours, excluding scheduled maintenance downtime or disasters outside of Service Provider’s control.

EnCirca will respond by email or phone in: 

• 4 hours for issues classified as urgent
• 1 business day for issues classified as normal priority, service request, or business inquiry. 
• Urgent: A component, application, or critical feature is down and no work can be performed as a result. 
• Normal Priority: Anomalous system behavior or system problem that doesn’t prevent work on the system
• Service Request: Routine request for maintenance
• Business Inquiry: A question regarding a change to (new increased/decreased, disconnected) the contracted service.

Domains

Expiration: 

Upon a domain reaching its expiration date without a renewal, the domain name registration is deemed terminated. To ensure customers are aware of pending expirations of their domain names, EnCirca sends multiple email notices to its customers: 90 days before, 60, 45, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 2, 1, 0, -1, -5, and -10 days after.

• Transfer to another registrar is not permitted following the expiration date.
• 0 to 2 days after the expiration date, the nameservers for the domain will be changed. This will disrupt any website or email addresses associated with the domain.
• Customers can still renew their domains within 5 days following the expiration date without extra charge. Once the names are renewed, they will be restored to their previous nameserver settings.
• After five (5) days of expiration, a customer may still recover their domains, but there will be a late fee. 
• EnCirca may elect to delete the domain, auction or transfer ownership of the domain to a third party at any time following ten (10) days after the expiration date. If EnCirca elects to delete the domain name, this may occur at any time between ten (10) and forty (40) days following the expiration date.
• At any time after ten (10) days following the expiration date, the domain may be removed from the customer’s account and their contact information removed from the Whois contacts. Customers will receive email notification of this account move.Customers wishing to renew their domain after this point will need to pay an extra recovery fee.
• If a name is deleted, then the customer of record, as of the expiration date, is permitted to recover the domain name by paying EnCirca a restore fee within thirty (30) days following the date of deletion (where supported by the corresponding registry).

Abuse: 

EnCirca will respond to abuse complaints within 5 days. If customers suspect a domain name registered with EnCirca is engaged in illegal activity, or to report a copyright or trademark infringement, they can contact EnCirca via email, chat, phone, fax or mail.

All other terms and policies: https://www.encirca.com/legal/