Reliability, Uptime, and Data Retention
Files.com maintains a publicly available Status Page, which shows a real-time operational status. This page also shows a 90-day history of all available protocols and interfaces available through the Files.com application, including:
- Files.com website
- Web interface
- FTP/FTPS
- SFTP
- WebDAV
- LDAP/Active directory
- RestAPI
- WebhookAPI
- Publicly shared files
The Files.com status page will also show any incidents affecting system availability in the form of an Incident Report. Those incident reports will contain a description of the event, lessons learned, and how they were applied to the Files.com platform.
All our server instances, file storage, and database hosting are provided by Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com.
Amazon Web Services has achieved ISO 27001 certification and has successfully completed multiple SAS70 Type II audits.
Amazon has many years of experience designing, constructing, and operating large-scale data centers. This experience is applied to the Amazon platform and infrastructure.
We store all files uploaded by customers in the Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service. Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage.
Objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region. Once stored, Amazon S3 maintains the durability of your objects by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy.
Amazon S3 also regularly verifies the integrity of data stored using checksums. If corruption is detected, it is repaired using redundant data.
We save backups of deleted files and retain such backups for a period of time that is customizable by you. Our support staff is able to restore deleted files directly back to your account.
All files are stored by default in the US Standard Region of Amazon S3, meaning they are exclusively stored within the United States. Customers may request to have files stored in other S3 regions by contacting us.
Administrators can set their entire Files.com site to store all files in any single region. In addition, Power and Premier plans can have more than one region active simultaneously and can set the region choice on any folder.
Files are encrypted-at-rest within Amazon S3, with all encryption keys stored in a key-management escrow service operated by Amazon S3.
Our front-end HTTP and FTP servers are server instances powered by the Amazon EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud. Within Amazon EC2, we maintain four primary client-facing HTTP/FTP front-end server instances, each in a separate EC2 Availability Zone.
Availability Zones are distinct locations engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Launching instances in separate Availability Zones prevents applications from failure of a single location.
These server instances are monitored every minute on ports 80, 443, 21, 22, and 990 to ensure uptime. Whenever any instance goes down, our server administrators are immediately paged.
We ship pertinent information from system and event logs to separate servers that store our system logs and alert us to any unusual activity.
While we ordinarily operate from the Amazon EC2 US-East Region (Northern Virginia), we have procedures in place that would allow us to migrate our entire service to the Amazon EC2 US-West Region (Northern California) in the event of a major disruption to US-East.
We use Amazon Relational Database Service Aurora, a managed database hosting service, to host our databases. Amazon RDS ensures that our databases are always patched with the latest updates.
We use Amazon RDS's "Multi-AZ" capability to ensure that a hot-backup standby database server is always running and available in a separate Availability Zone.
We have point-in-time restore capabilities on our database servers for any time in the last 7 days. This means we can restore our database to its state at any given time in the past 7 days (such as immediately before a service disruption).
Additionally, we take full database snapshots and store them in Amazon S3 every 24 hours. These snapshots are retained for at least 7 days.
Our servers are configured to page and email our system administrators any time any unexpected event (called an "Exception") occurs in our web application software.
Our engineers respond as quickly as possible to any error states.
We retain these exception reports for at least thirty days.
Automatic fire detection and suppression equipment has been installed to reduce risk. The fire detection system utilizes smoke detection sensors in all data center environments, mechanical and electrical infrastructure spaces, chiller rooms, and generator equipment rooms. These areas are protected by either wet-pipe, double-interlocked pre-action, or gaseous sprinkler systems.
The data center electrical power systems are designed to be fully redundant and maintainable without any impact to operations, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units provide backup power in the event of an electrical failure for critical and essential loads in the facility. Data centers use generators to provide backup power for the entire facility.
Climate control is required to maintain a constant operating temperature for servers and other hardware, preventing overheating and reducing the possibility of service outages. Data centers remain conditioned to maintain atmospheric conditions at optimal levels. Personnel and systems monitor and control temperature and humidity at appropriate levels.
We recognize that downtime can be costly and reflect poorly on your business. As such, we offer an SLA to customers on the Premier and Enterprise Plans. We will provide compensation in the form of a refund to your credit card (if you have one on file) or a service credit toward future payments (if you do not have a credit card on file) if specific uptime goals are not met, you have a qualifying plan, and request a refund.
We define uptime as the percentage of time during a Usage Period HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, and SFTP services are available on ports 80, 443, 21, 990, and 22 on at least one server in the IP Pool for your site. The IP Pool for your site is defined as the full set of IPs returned by DNS when resolving your Files.com subdomain or associated custom domain if any. Please note that you may need to make multiple DNS queries to retrieve the complete set of IPs in the IP Pool.
The uptimes of these five services, as computed by Wormly (or another monitoring system we may choose to engage), will be averaged together to calculate an overall uptime.
- If uptime during a Usage Period is below 99.9%, you are entitled to a refund or service credit equal to 50% of your last Usage Period payment (not including any Usage fees).
- If uptime during a Usage Period is below 99.5%, you are entitled to a refund or service credit equal to 100% of your last Usage Period payment (not including any Usage fees).
- No refund will be given if Files.com determines, in its sole and reasonable discretion, that you breached any part of these Terms of Service. SLA refund requests must be made during the Usage Period immediately following the qualifying downtime.
Scheduled downtime for maintenance and other purposes is not counted against uptime for purposes of this SLA. Scheduled downtime is defined as those times where Files.com notifies you of periods of downtime at least five (5) days prior to the commencement of such downtime.
In today's modern business climate and the era of additional compliance requirements and regulations such as GDPR, companies must balance the competing needs of data backup and redundancy with thoughtful application of retention policies that minimize the risks that come with storing too much data for too long.
Every business has different regulatory and client-dictated compliance standards for all aspects of data storage. Files.com realizes this complexity and allows you to dictate where, how, and for how long your files are stored.
We store all files in the Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service. This provides you with a highly durable storage infrastructure from a trusted provider. By default, all objects are stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region, providing the comfort of knowing your data is safe from catastrophic losses.
Files.com offers the ability for you to locate your storage in specific geographic regions.
Customizable region settings are built directly into the platform on a per-folder basis, allowing you to easily comply with requests for data localization.
The Files.com platform allows site administrators to set their own file time-to-live settings on both a global default and per-folder basis.
Do you have a client that requires their files removed within 7 days after upload, unlike the rest of your clients who require that you keep their files until manually deleted?
No problem, set your global setting to have files never expire, then navigate to the specific client folder to select a file expiration override. You will have a bulletproof failsafe that meets all compliance requirements.
We realize that mistakes happen, and files may sometimes get accidentally deleted due to user error. These missing files can have a cataclysmic impact on your business. To protect against this, Files.com allows site administrators to dictate a master backup retention policy that meets your business needs.
We allow you to choose anything from immediate removal of files in all cases to always retaining a backup of every deleted file for 30, 60, 90, or even 365 days.
Please note that all deleted files being retained for backup purposes are counted against your monthly usage quotas, and associated storage values are reported within the Usage tab in your web interface.
Have a file or folder that has been accidentally deleted and needs to be restored? No problem. As long as the file remains within your retained deleted files window, our Customer Success team is able to assist with the restore.
It is as simple as submitting a support ticket and letting our team know the path of deleted files, the approximate deletion date, and where you would like them restored. Once processed, your files will be restored and show in your active files within a matter of minutes.
Files.com is committed to GDPR compliance. We provide customers the flexibility to manage their data from around the world, allowing quick responses to Right to be Forgotten and other requests from data subjects. See our GDPR page for more information on Files.com and the GDPR.
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