Blue Wave Hosting Terms of Service

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Definitions
3. Inappropriate Actions
   1. Posting music or movie archives for download or storage
   2. Copyright Violations
   3. Selling or distributing freely tools which are used for spam
   4. Sending unsolicited emails
   5. Posting unsolicited commercial messages to USENET
   6. Hacking
      1. Attempting to violate or violating local security measures
      2. Attempting to compromise other systems through our servers
   7. DoS attacks
   8. Unauthorized Services
   9. Unauthorized Programs
   10. Age
4. Inappropriate Content
5. Rights We Reserve
6. Reseller Responsibility
   1. IP Addresses
7. Money-back Guarantee
8. Liability

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Introduction

We are a community; our services are here to benefit you and your businesses, organizations, and families. As such, we operate as a community. We attempt to make certain (as a law enforcement officer would) that you are not affecting other users adversely, and that other users are not affecting you adversely.

This document provides information about our services: what is permitted, and what is not. It is not all-inclusive, but it lays down the guidelines by which we operate.

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Definitions

This is a list of terms we use in this document, with some having moderately verbose definitions.

Low traffic site

This is the “average” site on the Internet. This type of website has little activity, in the range of 50 to 100 hits per day, and is updated infrequently. Typically, this type of website takes on up to 1 gigabyte of traffic in a month, depending on its content.

Moderate traffic site

This type of site is what most of our current customers are — websites which average in the range of 100 to 5,000 hits per day, and are updated on a semi-regular basis. These include many business and shopping cart sites, and average between 1 gigabyte to 10 gigabytes of traffic per month, depending on its content.

High traffic site

While we have some of these sites, they do not outnumber the low traffic sites and moderate traffic sites. These sites receive on average 5,000 to 100,000 hits per day, and are best fit for an independent server. Bandwidth is typically from 10 gigabytes to 50 gigabytes per month, depending on its content. A properly managed high-traffic site can live peacefully with shared hosting customers, but very few of these sites are properly managed if they are still residing with shared hosting customers after any prolonged period of time.

Abusive site

A site which violates our User Agreement, in the sense that its resource usage causes problems for other customers on our servers, and/or by doing one of the following:

• Excessive and prolonged processor or disk usage
• Providing large-scale downloads for large parties
• Utilizing CGI scripts which are poorly written, that consume resources and create zombie processes, or improper access to system resources of any kind
• Utilizing our servers and services to send large amounts of email, especially to those who did not ask for them (i.e. spam, opt-out mailing lists)
• Recompiling applications on our servers excessively (to the point it affects other users)
• Stealing or attempting to steal content from other customers
• Many more actions covered in more detail later in this document

Spam

Unsolicited email which may be bulk (thousands of emails sent), and/or commercial (advertisements for products and/or services). Generally, the rule of thumb is: if they did not ask for it and you have had no business with them that they would remember enough to not complain, it is spam.

Opt-Out Mailing Lists

An “opt-out” mailing list is defined by us as a mailing list which goes to those who never requested it, and the user must take the step of informing the owner of the list that he or she does not wish to receive the mailings. One specific exclusion is where the user is your company's customer. Everything else in this regard is considered spam by default, but we evaluate this on a case-by-case basis.

Zombie

A “dead” process (program running on the system) which has terminated, but is still lingering due to problematic error handling. A zombie exists after a process is terminated, but its parent process is still running.

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Inappropriate Actions

The following actions are defined by us as “inappropriate”, as they adversely affect other users on the server on which you reside:

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Posting music or movie archives for download or storage

Using our service to distribute music/audio or movie archives tends to lead to abuse, and can turn your low-to-moderate traffic site into an abusive site overnight. While we don't really care if you have a few of your own band's music or your own recorded seminars on our servers, if you are utilizing disk space recklessly for the purpose of distributing or archiving movies or music, we cannot allow this to continue.

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Copyright Violations

Posting materials copyrighted by others illegally on our servers is strictly prohibited.

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Selling or distributing freely tools which are used for spam

Distributing such software damages our and our customers' reputations on the Internet, and can lead to our network being blacklisted from being able to mail out. Therefore, we cannot allow this on our servers.

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Sending unsolicited emails

Utilizing our services to send unsolicited emails to others, or advertising your site(s) hosted on our servers (or our site(s)) via unsolicited emails, is strictly forbidden. Not only will your funds not be refunded, but we may drive to your house and beat you soundly.

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Posting unsolicited commercial messages to USENET

Posting advertisements to your site(s) or our site(s) on USENET is strictly prohibited.

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Hacking

There are many levels to this section, to differentiate between the different types of acceptable and unacceptable activities in this arena.

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Attempting to violate or violating local security measures

You may not attempt to compromise local security on our system, attempt to gain shell access, or execute programs outside the scope of your account. Such activities are strictly prohibited except under the following conditions:

• in situations where we grant you, in writing, such authority
• in situations where you wish to inform us that our servers may be vulnerable to an exploit, under the conditions below:
  • The exploitation MUST NOT affect other users, as exploiting a race condition does (by increasing the server load to astronomical levels), and
  • you will do no harm to the system, nor modify system files in any way.

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Attempting to compromise other systems through our servers

Attacking other systems through our servers is grounds for immediate termination of your account, and your information turned over to the appropriate law enforcement relative to your country. See also DoS below.

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DoS attacks

Utilizing our services for DoS attacks against other systems, or inviting DoS attacks against our servers is strictly prohibited. Doing so will result in non-refundable termination of your account, and your information turned over to the applicable law enforcement of your area.

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Unauthorized Services

You are not permitted to run any of your own publically-listening web services on our servers without appropriate permission. This includes, but is not limited to:

• IRC and chat daemons (there is a chat daemon provided with cPanel that you may use)
• RPC or SOAP services not running through your own web account over HTTP
• Additional webservers
• IRC or chat robots (e.g. eggdrop, tinman, emech)

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Unauthorized Programs

You may not attempt to gain shell access without permission. If you do have such permission, you may only run programs which are specifically necessary for your website's operation, and the built-in mail programs, such as:

• For website operation:
  • awk, sed, troff, or other programs associated with text manipulation
  • vi, emacs, ed, pico, and other text editors (you may use emacs for text editing — using the extended features (other than mailreading) are a violation of this agreement, except perhaps M-x doctor)
• Built-in mail programs:
  • pine, mutt, elm, Berkeley mail, and others

Examples of what you may NOT run:

• IRC clients, such as BitchX, ircii, or scrollz
• Newsreaders, such as tin, or rn
• Compilers, such as gcc, without explicit permission

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Age

You must be of 18 years of age to utilize our services.

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Inappropriate Content

We recognize your rights to free speech, and will not remove your sites based on our opinions. However, we will remove sites that are in violation of the law in our area. Such sites include but are not limited to:

• Fetish sites:
  • Scat/watersports fetish sites (if you don't know, don't ask)
  • Child pornography sites (we reserve the right to kill anyone who places one of these sites on our servers)
  • Bestiality sites (people having sexual relations with animals)
• Fraud sites:
  • MLM or “get rich quick” schemes designed to defraud
  • “Spoof” sites which imitate other sites in an attempt to gather credit card or other information deceptively
• Slander/Hate sites:
  • Sites whose purpose includes slander and/or libel of other parties that are not public individuals
  • Sites who advocate genocide or racial hatred and/or violence
  • Sites requesting the injury or death of others

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Rights We Reserve

We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, at any time, for any reason. This reason does not have to be known to the refusee. We reserve the right to be the sole arbiter in cases of dispute, and the right to contact you at any time regarding your account and/or websites. We reserve the right to suspend and/or terminate any account at any time, as is necessary to maintain the integrity of the server.

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Reseller Responsibility

Resellers are responsible for introducing these policies to their customers, and enforcing their compliance to this agreement.

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IP Addresses

We maintain ownership of all IP addresses on our servers. Should you have one for your website, you may not take it with you.

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Money-back Guarantees

30-day Satisfaction Guarantee

Should you become unsatisfied with our services within the first 30 days of your account activation, we will refund your hosting fee.

Resellers — In the event that you become unsatisfied with our services within 30 days of your reseller account activation, only your initial account fees will be refunded. Once you have added a resold account to your Reseller Plan you will no longer qualify for the money back guarantee/refund. WE CANNOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY FEES THAT YOU CHARGE YOUR CLIENTS.

We do not refund fees which you have paid for registering a domain.

There are no refunds on programming, SSL certificates, or prepaid support.

99.9% Uptime Guarantee

If your web server uptime is below 99.9% in one month your service fee for the entire month is refunded. This is not some cheap prorated refund, Blue Wave Hosting will refund the entire month. This is the best guarantee in the business!

Please allow 2 to 6 weeks for refund processing.

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Liability

We will not be responsible for any claimed damages, including incidental and consequential damages, which may arise from our servers going off-line or being unavailable for any reason whatsoever. Further, We will not be responsible for any claimed damages, including incidental or consequential damages, resulting from the corruption or deletion of any web site from one of our servers. All damages shall be limited to the immediate termination of service.

You are solely responsible for backups of your personal website and data. There are functions inside cPanel which allow for backing up your site — please do so on a regular basis.

We provide backups for the purpose of restoring the servers to operation, however, we cannot guarantee the integrity nor timeliness of these backups with regards to your websites.

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