Formdesk enables you to design forms with the purpose of publishing on the internet. You would like the forms to always be available and without any loss of data. It is important for you to be able to trust us to prevent any failures at any time, and when a failure should occur, having it solved as soon as possible. Besides you would like to know whom to address whenever you have any issues or questions.
Below you will find which efforts we make to ensure the highest possible availability of your forms, how data loss is prevented, which guarantees we give and where to turn for support.
Support
Support can be called upon during service hours. These service hours are from 08:00 until 17:00 GMT , with the exception of Saturdays, Sundays and regular Dutch holidays. Support consists of advisement by telephone or e-mail regarding the use and functioning of Formdesk.
You can only seek support if you are the contact-person that is registered for the account.
For our Business subscriptions, a Formdesk employee will reply to your support request immediately or ultimately within 2 working days after receiving the support request. Standard subscription plans don’t have a maximum response time.
Planned maintenance
Scheduled maintenance with an expected disruption in the availability of Formdesk of longer than 5 minutes, will be announced at least 3 days in advance by email. This message includes the following:
- the timing of planned maintenance;
- the expected duration of the work concerned, provided a full stop of the operation of Formdesk;
- the nature of the likely disruption of Formdesk.
The expected duration of maintenance over a period of one year shall not exceed a total amount of 1 hour.
Availability
We are committed to provide our service with as little disruption as possible.
There is disruption of our service when:
- there is a deviation from the specifications which prevents normal use of Formdesk;
- an interruption of more than 5 minutes occurs;
- the interruption is not the result of scheduled maintenance.
With Business subscriptions, we guarantee an availability rate of 99.5%. This rate is measured over a calendar month. For each month that we as a result of circumstances attributable to us are unable to comply with this warranty, you can request us to reimburse one-month subscription fee until 2 weeks after the occurrence of the disruption.
Fault prevention
The Formdesk servers are housed in the Datacenter Group data center in Delft. This data center is one of the most advanced data centers in the areas of security, climate control and redundancy. The data center is ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and NEN 7510 certified. Prolocation, the carrier that provides our internet connection in the data center, is directly connected to the important internet exchanges and has its own backbone.
All Formdesk servers and networking equipment are of high quality and are redundant. The servers have redundant power supplies, disks and network connections with the aim that a server continues to function even if a component fails.
For each server, we have a standby back-up server. These servers have the latest version of Formdesk and include a “near real-time” back-up of the database (the back-up is several seconds behind). In addition to the “near real-time” back-up there is a daily full back-up of the database. These back-ups are kept up to 1 month.
New versions of Formdesk are carefully tested before they are put into production. There is a rollback procedure by which the present system can be reversed and can be returned to the latest stable version of Formdesk.
Fault detection
Serious faults (with priority I and II) are automatically detected and automatically attempted to resolve the interference. If this fails, a number of Formdesk technicians are notified by phone within 5 minutes after the failure occurs and a fault report is emailed and sent via SMS. Detection and notification are made redundant from different locations.
If you experience a failure, you can always perform an emergency call using our contact form. Our technicians in duty will immediately be notified.
Failure recovery
When failures occur in the use of Formdesk, we categorize it in priority and carry out related activities according to the table below.
| Priori- ty‑ class |
Situation | Actions |
| I | Formdesk can not be used. This has a critical impact on the production environment where an immediate recovery is required. |
Immediately after reporting, all activities are undertaken towards a permanent solution and this is continued until an acceptable solution is available, or to show that further research, possibly with others, is necessary. |
| II | Formdesk is operational but under severe restrictions. The situation requires urgent recovery. | As soon as possible but within 8 working hours, activities are undertaken focused on recovery. |
| III | Formdesk is limited operational. | Within 3 days after reporting activities are to be undertaken focused on recovery. |
| IV | There are wishes connected to improvements in Formdesk regarding deviations from the specifications. | We assess the desire to improve Formdesk and will, if the wish is granted, prepare a plan to carry out maintenance. |
Malfunction procedure
To recover failures as quickly as possible a number of situations are identified and procedures established for this recovery. These procedures mainly concern interferences with priority classes I and II.
If an interruptions of service occurs that is not (expected to be) resolved within an hour and the email facility is not effected by the fault, the contacts of the effected accounts will be informed by email. If the outage is Formdesk wide (over all servers) a tweet will be sent out (https://twitter.com/formdesk_com). These media channels will also be used to keep you informed about the status of the outage.
Total failure at the data center:
We have carefully selected the data center which carries our service and the carrier that provides the internet connection. Although we cannot solve any issues outside our infrastructure, we keep ourselves well informed of the progress of the restoration by the data center or the carrier.
Firewall malfunction:
If one of our firewalls should fail an automatic failover will take place.
Hardware malfunction:
If one of our servers should fail, we are able to enable a back-up server remotely. If we decide that there is no other faster way to recover the fault, then we will do this within 1 hour after the discovery of the malfunction. The loss of data is minimized because the back-up is just seconds behind.
Software malfunction:
If the operating system or any other critical software on one of our servers should fail, we are able to switch to a back-up server remotely. If we decide that there is no other faster way to restore the fault, then we will do this within 1 hour after the discovery of the malfunction. The loss of data is minimized because the back-up is just seconds behind.
Data loss or corruption due to a hardware failure:
If the Formdesk database becomes corrupted due to a hardware failure such as a hard drive crash, then we are able to switch to a back-up server remotely. If we decide that there is no other faster way to recover the data, then we will do this within 1 hour after the discovery of the malfunction.
Data loss or corruption due to a software bug or manual operation:
If data should become lost or corrupted due to a bug in the software or a manual action of one of our technicians and this fatal instruction is executed on the back-up database, we will do everything to restore the data by using the last full back-up rather than replacing the entire database with the back-up.
Data loss due to user action:
If data is lost due to a request from a user, we usually can recover the data, provided the request for recovery is received within one month. The costs that are charged are based on the hourly rate that we use for programming. Restoration of completed data removed from the results page can be done free of charge.
Liability
Subject to the specified warranty (mentioned under availability) for business subscribers we can not be held liable for any damage which arises from an interruption of Formdesk, loss of data or other cause by using Formdesk.
