Hosting agreement

A hosting agreement is the contract by which a provider makes infrastructure, servers, storage, network and associated services available to a customer to run applications and store data. It covers a variety of situations, from renting space in a data centre to cloud computing. The hosting agreement is a services contract whose main issues are availability, security, data location and exit from the contract.

The essential clauses of the hosting agreement

First, the description of the service: allocated resources, redundancy, back-ups, business continuity plan, support. Next, theservice level agreement, which sets availability, restoration times and penalties. Then security: technical and organisational measures, certifications, incident notification, customer audits. Finally, data location, sub-processors, duration, price and the conditions of termination and exit.

The host’s liability

The host is bound by a reinforced best-efforts obligation as to security and availability, the intensity of which depends on the contractual commitments. Limitation of liability clauses are common and valid between professionals, subject to gross negligence and to the absence of contradiction with the essential obligation. Where the host processes personal data on behalf of the customer, it acts as a processor within the meaning of the General Data Protection Regulation, which requires a contract compliant with its Article 28. For health data, a specific approval or certification is required. The texts can be consulted on Légifrance.

Key points

In practice, the hosting agreement must be read together with the provider’s general terms, which often prevail over commercial commitments. The customer checks the consistency between its own commitments to its customers and those obtained from the host, and organises the exit from signing. Hosted data may also constitute trade secrets whose contractual protection must be ensured. The firm drafts and negotiates these contracts and acts in performance disputes, as presented on the page contracts.