Terms of Service | Hunter Website Services
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Terms of Service

The use of website hosting and domain name services from Hunter Website Services (hereafter referred to as "HWS") constitutes agreement to these terms.

1) Account Setup / Email on file

HWS will setup your account after HWS have received payment and HWS and/or payment partner(s) have screened the order(s) in case of fraud. It is your responsibility to provide us with an email address which is not @ the domain(s) you are signing up under. If there is ever an abuse issue or HWS need to contact you, the primary email address on file will be used for this purpose. It is your responsibility to ensure the email address on file is current or up to date at all times. Providing false contact information of any kind may result in the termination of your account.

Transfers

HWS will make every effort to help you move your site to us. However, HWS can not make guarantees regarding the availability, possibility, or time required to complete an account transfer. Each hosting company is configured differently, and some hosting platforms save data in an incompatible or proprietary format, which may make it extremely difficult if not impossible to migrate some or all account data. HWS will do its best, but in some cases HWS may be unable to assist you in a transfer of data from an old host.

2) Content

All services provided by HWS may only be used for lawful purposes. The laws of the State of Florida, the State of Texas, Australia and the United States of America apply.

The customer agrees to indemnify and hold harmless HWS from any claims resulting from the use of its services.

Use of HWS services to infringe upon any copyright or trademark is prohibited. This includes but is not limited to unauthorized copying of music, books, photographs, or any other copyrighted work. The offer of sale of any counterfeit merchandise of a trademark holder will result in the immediate termination of your account. Any account found to be in violation of anothers copyright will be expeditiously removed, or access to the material disabled. Any account found to be in repeated violation of copyright laws will be suspended and/or terminated from HWS hosting. If you believe that your copyright or trademark is being infringed upon, please use the email form on the contact page and include any information required. If the request is of a licensing issue, HWS may require documentation.

Using an account as a backup/storage device is not permitted, with the exception of one cPanel backup of the same account. Please do not take backups of your backups.

Examples of unacceptable material on all servers include:

  • Topsites
  • IRCD (irc servers)
  • IRC Scripts/Bots
  • Proxy Scripts/Anonymizers
  • Pirated Software/Warez
  • Image Hosting Scripts (similar to Photobucket or Tinypic)
  • AutoSurf/PTC/PTS/PPC sites
  • IP Scanners
  • Bruteforce Programs/Scripts/Applications
  • Mail Bombers/Spam Scripts
  • Banner-Ad services (commercial banner ad rotation)
  • File Dump/Mirror Scripts (similar to rapidshare)
  • Commercial Audio Streaming (more than one or two streams)
  • Escrow/Bank Debentures
  • High-Yield Interest Programs (HYIP) or Related Sites
  • Investment Sites (FOREX, E-Gold Exchange, Second Life/Linden Exchange, Ponzi, MLM/Pyramid Scheme)
  • Sale of any controlled substance without prior proof of appropriate permit(s)
  • Prime Banks Programs
  • Lottery Sites
  • MUDs/RPGs/PPBGs
  • Hateful/Racist/Harassment oriented sites
  • Hacker focused sites/archives/programs
  • Sites promoting illegal activities
  • Forums and/or websites that distribute or link to warez/pirated/illegal content
  • Bank Debentures/Bank Debenture Trading Programs
  • Fraudulent Sites (Including, but not limited to sites listed at aa419.org & escrow fraud.com)
  • Mailer Pro

HWS services, including all related equipment, networks and network devices are provided only for authorized customer use. HWS systems may be monitored for all lawful purposes, including to ensure that use is authorized, for management of the system, to facilitate protection against unauthorized access, and to verify security procedures, survivability, and operational security. During monitoring, information may be examined, recorded, copied and used for authorized purposes. Use of HWS system(s) constitutes consent to monitoring for these purposes.

HWS reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Any material that, in HWS' judgment, is obscene, threatening, illegal, or violates the terms of service in any manner may be removed from HWS servers (or otherwise disabled), with or without notice.

Failure to respond to an email regarding abuse within 48 hours may result in the suspension or termination of your services.

If in doubt regarding the acceptability of your site or service, please use the contact form and HWS will be happy to assist you.

Potential harm to minors is strictly forbidden, including but not limited to child pornography or content perceived to be child pornography. Any site found to host child pornography or linking to child pornography will be suspended immediately without notice. Violations will be reported to the appropriate law enforcement agency.

It is your responsibility to ensure that scripts/programs installed under your account are secure and permissions of directories are set properly, regardless of installation method. When at all possible, set permissions on most directories to 755 or as restrictive as possible. Users are ultimately responsible for all actions taken under their account. This includes the compromise of credentials such as user name and password. It is required that you use a secure password. If a weak password is used, your account may be suspended until you agree to use a more secure password. Audits may be done to prevent weak passwords from being used. If an audit is performed, and your password is found to be weak, HWS will notify you and allow time for you to change/update your password.

3) Zero Tolerance Spam Policy

HWS take a zero tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited e-mail, bulk emailing, and spam. "Safe lists" and purchased lists will be treated as spam. Any user who sends out spam will have their account terminated with or without notice.

Sites advertised via SPAM (Spamvertised) may not be hosted on HWS servers. This provision includes, but is not limited to SPAM sent via fax, email, instant messaging, or usenet/newsgroups. No organization or entity listed in the ROKSO may be hosted on HWS servers. Any account which results in HWS' IP space being blacklisted will be immediately suspended and/or terminated.

HWS reserves the right to require changes or disable as necessary any web site, account, database, or other component that does not comply with its established policies, or to make any such modifications in an emergency at its sole discretion.

HWS reserves the right to charge the holder of the account used to send any unsolicited e-mail a clean up fee or any charges incurred for blacklist removal. This cost of the clean up fee is entirely at the discretion of HWS.

4) Payment Information

You agree to supply appropriate payment for the services received from HWS, in advance of the time period during which such services are provided. You agree that until and unless you notify HWS of your desire to cancel any or all services received, those services will be billed on a recurring basis.

As a client of HWS, it is your responsibility to ensure that your payment information is up to date, and that all invoices are paid on time.

Invoices that have been paid more than once with multiple Paypal Subscriptions can only be added as credit towards the account and cannot be refunded via Paypal. If you require assistance with this provision, please use the contact form.

HWS reserves the right to change the monthly payment amount and any other charges at anytime.

5) Backups and Data Loss

Your use of this service is at your sole risk. The backup service is provided to you as a courtesy. HWS is not responsible for files and/or data residing on your account. You agree to take full responsibility for files and data transferred and to maintain all appropriate backup of files and data stored on HWS servers.

6) Cancellations and Refunds

HWS reserves the right to cancel the account at any time with or without notice.

Any abuse of staff in any medium or format will result in the suspension or termination of your services.

Customers may cancel at any time.

The following methods of payments are non-refundable, and refunds will be posted as credit to the hosting account:

  • PayPal

There are no refunds on administrative fees, install fees for custom software, or domain name purchases. Refund requests for website hosting accounts will be refunded on a prorated basis of any unused time.

Only first-time accounts are eligible for a refund. For example, if you've had an account with us before, canceled and signed up again, you will not be eligible for a refund or if you have opened a second account with us.

Violations of the Terms of Service will waive the refund policy.

7a) Resource Usage

User may not:

  • Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.
  • Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
  • Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy)
  • Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
  • Run any bit torrent application, tracker, or client. You may link to legal torrents off-site, but may not host or store them on HWS servers.
  • Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities
  • Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc
  • Run cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes When using PHP include functions for including a local file, include the local file rather than the URL. Instead of include("http://yourdomain.com/include.php") use include("include.php")

7b) INODES

The use of more than 250,000 inodes on any account may potentially result in a warning first, and if no action is taken future suspension. Accounts found to be exceeding the 250,000 inode limit will automatically be removed from the backup system to avoid over-usage. Every file (a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode.

Sites that slightly exceed the inode limits are unlikely to be suspended; however, accounts that constantly create and delete large numbers of files on a regular basis, have hundreds of thousands of files, or cause file system damage may be flagged for review and/or suspension. The primary cause of excessive inodes seems to be due to users leaving their catchall address enabled, but never checking their primary account mailbox. Over time, tens of thousands of messages (or more) build up, eventually pushing the account past the inode limit. To disable your default mailbox, login to cPanel and choose "Mail", then "Default Address", "Set Default Address", and then type in: :fail: No such user here.

7c) Backup Limit

Any account using more than 20 gigs of disk space will be removed from the off site weekly backup with the the exception of Databases continuing to be backed up. All data will continue to be mirrored to a secondary drive which helps protect against data loss in the event of a drive failure.

8) Bandwidth Usage

You are allocated a monthly bandwidth allowance. This allowance varies depending on the hosting package you purchase. Should your account pass the allocated amount HWS reserve the right to suspend the account until the start of the next allocation, suspend the account until more bandwidth is purchased at an additional fee, suspend the account until you upgrade to a higher level of package, terminate the account and/or charge you an additional fee for the overages. Unused transfer in one month cannot be carried over to the next month.

9) Uptime Guarantee

If your server has a physical downtime that is not within the 99.9% uptime you may receive one month of credit on your account. Approval of the credit is at the discretion of HWS dependant upon justification provided. Third party monitoring service reports may not be used for justification due to a variety of factors including the monitor's network capacity/transit availability. The uptime of the server is defined as the reported uptime from the operating system and the Apache Web Server which may differ from the uptime reported by other individual services. All requests must be made in writing via email.

10) Price Change

HWS reserve the right to change prices listed on hunterwebs.com.au, and the right to change the amount of resources given to plans at any time. In the event of any changes in hosting packages including prices, you will be given the option to remain with your current plan at its current price.

11) Coupons

Discounts and coupon codes are reserved for first-time accounts *or first-time customers* only and may not be used towards the purchase of a domain registration unless otherwise specified. If you have signed up using a particular domain, you may not resign up for that domain using another coupon at a later date. Any account found in violation of these policies will be reviewed by HWS and the appropriate invoices will be added to the account. Coupon abuse will not be tolerated and may result in the suspension or termination of the account.

12a) Indemnification

Customer agrees that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold HWS harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and claims, including reasonable attorney's fees asserted against HWS, its agents, its customers, officers and employees, that may arise or result from any service provided or performed or agreed to be performed or any product sold by customer, its agents, employees or assigns. Customer agrees to defend, indemnify and hold harmless HWS against liabilities arising out of; (1) any injury to person or property caused by any products sold or otherwise distributed in connection with HWS; (2) any material supplied by customer infringing or allegedly infringing on the proprietary rights of a third party; (3) copyright infringement and (4) any defective products sold to customers from HWS's server.

12b) Arbitration

By using any HWS services, you agree to submit to binding arbitration. If any disputes or claims arise against HWS or its subsidiaries, such disputes will be handled by an arbitrator of HWS's choice. Arbitrators shall be selected pursuant to the applicable rules. All decisions rendered by the arbitrator will be binding and final. The arbitrator's award is final and binding on all parties. You are also responsible for any and all costs related to such arbitration.

13) Disclaimer

HWS shall not be responsible for any damages your business may suffer. HWS makes no warranties of any kind, expressed or implied for services HWS provide. HWS disclaims any warranty or merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This includes loss of data resulting from delays, no deliveries, wrong delivery, and any and all service interruptions caused by HWS.

14) Disclosure to law enforcement

HWS may disclose any subscriber information to law enforcement agencies without further consent or notification to the subscriber upon lawful request from such agencies. HWS will cooperate fully with law enforcement agencies.

15) Changes to the TOS

HWS reserves the right to revise its policies at any time without notice.