Data, Backup & Recovery Policy

Effective and last updated: August 11, 2026

1. Customer responsibility

This Policy applies to services provided by Top-Notch Hosting Services LLC, doing business as Top-Notch Hosting. You are the primary custodian of your content and data. Unless a separate signed order expressly identifies a managed backup service and its specifications, our hosting and email plans are not archival, records-management, or guaranteed backup services. You must decide what must be retained, how often it changes, and what recovery time your business requires.

Your independent backup should be stored in a separate system or provider, protected from unauthorized access, and tested through periodic restoration. Merely downloading a file without checking that it is complete and usable is not a tested backup.

2. Operational copies are not guaranteed customer backups

We or our infrastructure providers may create snapshots, replicas, cached copies, logs, or backups for maintenance, security, deployment rollback, troubleshooting, or disaster recovery. Unless specifically included in a written order, these operational copies:

• may not run continuously or on a schedule suited to your needs;
• may omit some content, external services, messages, settings, or recent changes;
• may be corrupted, incomplete, overwritten, inaccessible, or fail to restore;
• are not guaranteed to be available on request or retained for a particular period; and
• do not replace your independent backups.

3. Recovery assistance

If data loss or corruption occurs, contact Dashboard → Support promptly and stop making unnecessary changes. We may attempt a repair or restore from an available operational copy on a commercially reasonable, best-efforts basis. Recovery is not guaranteed, may restore an older state, and may not recover all systems or data. Unless your order expressly includes recovery work, extensive recovery assistance may require a separate quote and approval.

4. Common risks

Data can be lost or damaged through software defects, failed updates, human error, compromised credentials, malware, customer or administrator actions, third-party integration failures, provider outages, hardware failure, DNS changes, account suspension, nonpayment, legal orders, or events beyond reasonable control. Security safeguards and operational snapshots reduce some risks but cannot eliminate them.

5. Cancellation, expiration, and termination

Export everything you want to keep before a cancellation, migration, expiration, or termination becomes effective. When service ends, access may stop and active service data may be deleted without a post-termination recovery period. We do not promise to retain or restore ended-service data. Residual data in operational backups may remain inaccessible until routine rotation, deletion, or legal retention completes.

6. Privacy and sensitive information

Protect backup copies with appropriate encryption, access control, and retention limits. Do not place full payment-card data, authentication secrets, or regulated information in a service unless the plan and a written agreement expressly support that use. You are responsible for legal notices, permissions, and retention rules applicable to information you control.

7. Allocation of risk

Your subscription price does not include insurance against the value of your content, records, revenue, or business continuity. To the fullest extent permitted by law, data-loss damages and our aggregate liability are limited as stated in the Terms of Service. These limits do not apply where liability cannot legally be excluded or limited.

8. Practical backup checklist

• Choose a backup frequency based on how much recent work you can tolerate losing.
• Keep at least one copy outside the hosted service and outside the same account.
• Protect backups with encryption and multi-factor authentication where available.
• Document the restoration steps and test them periodically.
• Export and verify data before major changes, migrations, or cancellation.