ACHQ Service Level Agreement

ACHQ commits to use all commercially reasonable efforts to achieve an average minimum uptime of 99.9% (measured on a quarterly basis) of the Payment Interface, to receive Transaction requests, excluding from the uptime calculation any downtime of the Payment Interface caused by acts or omissions of Merchant, Integrated Partners, changes implemented on specific Merchant request, general internet failures, failures of individual Payment Methods or force majeure. Merchant is obliged to immediately notify ACHQ of any downtime of the Payment Interface which it experiences and to provide all reasonably requested co-operation in investigating and resolving any such downtime.

ACHQ uses all reasonable efforts to avoid having to take the Payment Interface offline for executing planned maintenance. Should under exceptional circumstances such maintenance nevertheless prove necessary, ACHQ will provide as much notice as practically possible and plan such maintenance in a manner and on a date and time to minimize the potential number of affected potential Transactions for all its Merchants. Should under emergency situations (e.g. in case of force majeure event or terrorist attack) unplanned maintenance be necessary to the Payment Interface necessitating it to be taken offline, ACHQ will use all available resources to keep the required downtime to the absolute minimum.

The Basics

Our Service Level Agreement (SLA) commits to a 99.9% uptime

  • We use consistent maintenance windows whenever possible, but at times may need to make emergency changes for security and other reasons.
  • Customer Support is available during extended business hours and will also respond 24 x 7 in the event of an emergency.

Reliability

ACHQ has consistently achieved a 99.9% application uptime.  Redundancy is built in across layers of the stack including but not limited to servers, storage, firewalls, web application firewalls, load balancers and networking components.

Uptime

ACHQ measures Monthly Uptime as the number of minutes per month when the ACHQ merchant portal is available, as calculated below.  Our multiple monitoring tools monitor our infrastructure 24 x 7.  If there is an issue, our automated monitoring systems alert our technical staff.

Here are some situations that will not be counted toward Downtime (“Excluded Downtime”):

  • “Scheduled Downtime” to complete maintenance including system upgrades and updates.
  • Issues related to integrations you have configured and their configuration or
  • Issues stemming from service providers and other third parties such as integrated partners and other issues that are beyond ACHQ’s control or
  • Network problems which are beyond our control such as your internet connection, firewall, or routing configurations preventing data from flowing to or from ACHQ or bad routing tables between your ISP and our web servers or
  • Issues related to the performance of your payment system, etc. that are outside ACHQ’s control and “Force majeure” – events or circumstances beyond our reasonable control (such as an act of God, act of government, flood, fire, earthquake, civil unrest, act of terror, denial of service attack, or ISP failure

“Monthly Uptime” is the percentage of total minutes in a month when the ACHQ payment platform and API was available to you. This is calculated by dividing the number of uptime minutes in the month (all uptime minutes plus Excluded Downtime as defined above) by the total number of minutes in that month.

Scheduled Downtime

ACHQ may occasionally need to perform maintenance to ensure a high level of security and reliability or install major system upgrades. To keep things simple and least impactful to you, we strive to schedule maintenance on the last Sunday of each month, between 5 am – 8 am Eastern Time. Only exceptional circumstances will affect the availability of the Payment Interface for accepting Transactions be impacted by scheduled downtime.

If we need to perform maintenance outside the monthly window, we will notify you at least 48 hours in advance via the email address provided in your ACHQ account.  In circumstances where we need to perform unscheduled maintenance for critical reasons, e.g., an emergency security change, we’ll do so because it is of import to your security or the performance/availability of the system.

Support

ACHQ’s Support team is available to assist you Monday – Friday from 9:00 am – 7:00 pm Eastern Time, excluding holidays.  You may submit a ticket (at any time) via www.achq.com/support , or, during these hours, speak to a Account Executive who will answer questions, troubleshoot problems and assist as needed to enable you to get the most from your partnership with ACHQ and your use of the ACHQ platform.  You will also be provided with a direct telephone number that you can use should you encounter an emergency after hours. We use the following severity levels to guide our team:

  • “Critical Severity” support issues are responded to within 1 hour and must be reported via phone so we can most quickly troubleshoot with you. Examples of these issues include unavailability of the ACHQ portal, platform, integrations, or APIs, or a problem that is severely adversely impacting your ability to use the platform.
  • “High Severity” support issues are responded to within 4 hours and should be reported via telephone, via achq.com/support, or by emailing [email protected]. Examples of these issues include degraded performance of the ACHQ platform or APIs, although the portal and processing are still
  • Other support issues are responded to by the next business day and should be reported via telephone, achq.com/support or by emailing [email protected].  Examples include general questions, feature requests, data pulls, integration troubleshooting, etc.