These terms and conditions form the basis of your contract so please read them carefully. For hosting, I rent space on a professionally maintained web server, buying in bulk which enables me to offer discounted rated. "We"/"us" refers to myself and the parent hosting company. These are the T&Cs which are imposed by that company and are therefore not negotiable.
If you order web hosting from us you are bound by these terms and conditions. If you do not agree to these Terms then please don't submit an order.
We will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of the provisions described in this document.
Your contract runs for 12 month from the date you first ordered. Should you cancel during this time I will refund your fee on a pro rata basis.
Domain name registration fees are not refundable because the registries will not refund us. It is the customers responsibility to ensure that all names are spelled correctly prior to ordering domain names.
Domain names cannot be changed once they are registered. This is because the domain registries will not refund us once a domain name is registered.
Any attempt to undermine or cause harm to one of our servers, or other customers, is strictly prohibited. Offenders will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
All services may be used for lawful purposes only. Transmission, storage, or presentation of any information, data or material in violation of any United Kingdom, or any International laws is prohibited.
The following list is not exhaustive, but it will indicate the sort of material you are not permitted to host:
Spam is "Unsolicited junk e-mail sent to large numbers of people to promote products or services".
We have a zero tollerance policy towards spam and we monitor our mail servers to ensure they are not being used for spamming. If we allowed customers to spam then our mail servers would be blacklisted and none of our customers would be able to send and receive mail reliably. It is in all customers interests that we stop spam.
We do not permit:
As delegated by our upstream providers, any sites using spam or selling of spam related software or bulk email content will be closed.
If you spam, we will see you doing it, your account will be terminated and you will not get a refund.
If you run a mailing list all the people you mail must have opted into the list. The list must not have been obtained from a third party. Your list server must use a system where an email is sent to the user when they sign up and they have to reply or click on a link to confirm their email address. This is known as "double opt in". The mailman program we provide with some hosting packages matches these requirements, as do many other mailing list systems. You must honour all unsubscribe requests within 24 hours.
If we receive a spam complaint about your account we will.
Each server has a limited amount of processing power and memory. We have found most our customers to stay within "reasonable limits", but sometimes people do cause problems for other users by using too many resources.
if you are a shared hosting customer you may not:
We do not allow clients to install their own cgi or php chat rooms. These tend to be a large drain on system resources and we cannot allow it as an account option. However, we provide chat systems with some hosting accounts which you may use free of charge.
Bulletin boards are permitted, provided they stay within the 10% server usage limit explained above.
We allow you (subject to a suitable hosting plan) to run programs to run continually in the background (cron jobs). However, these must not overload the server or affect other users sites.
If you go over any of the limits described above we will suspend your account and contact you to resolve the situation. We may offer dedicated server hosting for an additional charge. If you do not move to a dedicated server or reduce your system usage we will terminate your account to protect other customers.
We do not permit the use of :
We can provide SSH (secure telnet) access on some accounts on request. SSH access is provided for the purpose of testing scripts and carrying out site maintenace. It is not provided for any other purpose and there is no warranty of any kind should SSH fail to function for off server connections or activities. We reserve the right to withdraw SSH access at any time without notification. Customers are not permitted to run CGI or PHP shell emulation programs.
Each hosting plan we provide has a set amount of bandwidth available per month. We monitor this usage and if your site goes over the limit it will be suspended until the second day of the next month. If you do not wish to wait until the next month you can upgrade your hosting plan to one with more bandwidth. If you are concerned about going over your limit you should check your bandwidth usage in the control panel in the middle of the month and contact us if you think you will go over.
We will not be held responsible for Service Outages resulting from equipment not owned or operated by us or our suppliers. This includes, but is not limited to, Internet NAP failures or congestion (Problems with one specific dial up ISP etc.) and external backbone failures. Additionally, we will not be held responsible for delays in the registration or transfer of a domain due to registry related issues, for outages resulting from malfunctioning customer scripts or applications that are installed by the customer, nor for unusual traffic spikes or "denial of service" attacks on customer web sites.
Finally, we will not be held liable for Service Outage damages resulting in the loss of prospective profits or anticipated sales or as a result of expenditures, investments, or commitments in connection with the business. It is in your own interests to consider business continuity insurance if you rely on your web site for commercial purposes.
We do not provide DNS management services. If you require changes to DNS records (A, MX etc) we will do our best to carry them out but we cannot provide a warranty that the changes will continue to work in the future.
You will be invoiced for the full annual charge of hosting on your chosen plan. Refunds will be given on a pro rata basis if you decide to remove your hosting at any time, based on the number of days remaining until your renewal date. Your site will be removed from the internet immediately you notify us of cancellaton, unless you have arranged otherwise with us.
When an account is cancelled, all of its files are deleted and are not recoverable.
The service provided under this contract is the one listed on our web site on the day you ordered the service. For description purposes terms like PHP, Perl and Mysql refer to the versions of PHP, Perl and Mysql installed at the time you ordered. Although we regularly update these with security patches no commitment to upgrading to newer versions is intended or implied. The reasons for this are that some customers sites would not work with newer versions therefore upgrading to suit another customer's requirements could stop their site from working, and it may cause problems with some of our preinstalled scripts and software.
We want your web site to be a success, because that way you will want to renew your account and continue using our service. We will do our best to help you so please contact technical support if you have any difficulties. However, customers sometimes get confused about what constitutes a realistic level of technical support so we need to explain this in detail.
Our technical support is limited to the service as originally provided (web hosting and email).
We will not provide support with:
Support is provided via an online support manuals and myself by phone, email, site visit or remote connection as appropriate. Issues directly relating to hosting will be supported as part of your annual fee. Other matters arising will be looked at on an ad hoc basis.
We provide support in the English language only and we strongly recommend you have good conversational English before you sign up for any services with us.
We will not be held liable for any loss or damage caused by your inability to use the services (just as a car manufacturer could not be held liable for you being unable to drive).
We will endeavour to keep backups of your data in order to restore the server if we have a disk failure. However, we provide no guarantee that we will be able to do so. It is in your own interests to keep a copy of your web site backed up on your own computer (unless we are maintaining your site for you, when we will undertake to hold site copies off line). You can do this by simply uploading changes from a copy you hold or by using the backup tool provided with most of our web hosting accounts.
If you have an accident with your site we will do our best to help, but we may not be able to restore your files for you.
It is impossible to have too many backups. Keeping a local copy at your location is the best way to protect your data.
Some of our hosting plans include virus scanning. If you have ordered a service that includes this feature we will scan your incoming mail for viruses and reject any email which appears to contain one. We will update our virus definitions on a daily basis.
However, we cannot guarantee to remove all viruses all of the time. For example, viruses hidden within certain types of attachment may not be detected. Viruses in emails forwarded from other domains may not trigger the virus scan as it goes through our mail transport agent. You should still have an anti virus program running on your own computer because it can check your whole system, not just your emails.
We will not be held liable for any damage caused by viruses received through emails received via our servers.
We provide tools to help you control spam on some of our accounts. These include Spam Assassin and Box Trapper.
We can not be held liable for spam received in your account but there are a number of things you can do to prevent it being received.
The main reasons for people receiving spam are:
They have published thier email address on a web site or signed a guest book where i thas been harvested (if this happens to you then try and remove the email address from the web to prevent it being harvested again).
They are using the default (catch all) email account and spammers are sending to things like webmaster@ and postmaster@ (if this is happeneing then set upa seperate email account and set the default account to forward to :fail: which will reduce your level of incoming spam.
If you are receiving a lot of spam using spam assassin (where provided) will help reduce the level.
In some cases the level of incoming spam for one domain can be so high that we have to take special steps to protect our network. This is normally done by blocking incoming mail from servers listed in blacklists which track known commercial spam operations (e.g. Spamhaus). However, we do not use blanket or known innacurate blacklists as that could cause you to lose real mail. In some cases we will also block known sources of viruses. In extreme cases we may block all mail for a given domain or suggest other alternatives for mail delivery to protect our networks.
We reserve the right to refuse, cancel, or suspend services at our sole discretion.
By ordering services from us you agree to indemnify and hold harmless Alan Officer and his suppliers from any claims resulting from the use of the service which damages the subscriber or any other party.
Your use of our services are at your sole risk. All services are provided on an "AS IS" basis WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS,IMPLIED, CONSTRUCTIVE, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING,WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, NON INFRINGEMENT OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so this exclusion may not apply to you in full.
We make no guarantee of availability of service and reserves the right to change, withdraw, suspend, or discontinue any functionality or feature of the service.
IN NO EVENT WILL WE BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE OUR SERVICES OR ANY CONTENT THEREON. THIS DISCLAIMER APPLIES, WITHOUT LIMITATION, TO ANY DAMAGES OR INJURY, WHETHER FOR BREACH OF CONTRACT, TORT, OR OTHERWISE, CAUSED BY ANY FAILURE OF PERFORMANCE; ERROR; OMISSION; INTERRUPTION; DELETION; DEFECT; DELAY IN OPERATION OR TRANSMISSION; COMPUTER VIRUS; FILE CORRUPTION; COMMUNICATION-LINE FAILURE; NETWORK OR SYSTEM OUTAGE; OR THEFT, DESTRUCTION, UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO, ALTERATION OF, OR USE OF ANY RECORD.
The formation, construction and interpretation of this agreement shall be controlled by the laws of Scotland. The U.N. Convention of Contracts for the International Sale of Goods is expressly excluded from any interpretation of this Agreement.
These terms and conditions are exclusively governed by Scottish law and by ordering services from us you submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Scottish courts.
We will do our best to keep the service running reliably but we will not be held responsible for any losses you incur through your use of it. If you are in business you should ensure you have adequate business insurance and we recommend you contact an insurance broker.
We reserve the right to change or amend these Terms of Service at any time without prior notice.
Violations of these terms and conditions can be grounds for immediate account deactivation without refund.
Some files held by us are covered by the UK Data Protection Act. You can find out more about your rights in relation to these files here www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk.
By opening a hosting account with me, you are accepting the following conditions:
None of these brief conditions override the full T&Cs shown. If there is any doubt or conflict, the full T&Cs are viewed as being correct.
Enough legalese jargon already. Let's get that web site going!