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Note: items in red mean
that such item has been recently added
Just like in any other web host, there are policies on what you
can do with your web hosting account and can't do. However, we
are usually more flexible than other web hosts whenever we need
to enforce a policy.
Good behavior
Each customer is expected to use his/her account for the purpose
of maintaining a web site only, with responsibility and respect
toward other Internet users. Common sense is the best guide as
to what is right and wrong, and it's the same guide we'll use
when analyzing an event of bad behavior.
Lawful purposes only
All customers must use their web hosting accounts for lawful purposes
only. This means that you can't
house
or transmit any kind of information that could be considered illegal
by a government body.
Unauthorized use
No customer may use an account at Sanders Hosting to:
- Try to break in to
the account of another customer or user on the Internet.
- To "hack"
another account, computer or network at a local or remote
location.
- Run scripts that can
be damaging to another account or computer system either local
to our network or remote.
- Password cracking,
port scanning, or any other method used to find weaknesses
on a local or remote computer system.
- Other events we might
consider to be harmful to a computer system or network.
Legal and acceptable
content only
No customer may transmit or link to data that we may consider
illegal or immoral. This includes:
- Anything we might
consider graphic, obscene or of adult content (and this
includes banners too),
be
it text, photos, cartoons, renderings, etc.
The final determination of what constitutes such material
is made by Sanders Hosting.
- Information that is
damaging to an individual, group or organization. This includes
information promoting racism or hate crimes.
- MP3s or other formats
containing music that has not been authorized for public distribution.
- Game ROMS that can
be considered damaging to a company, its sales and/or brand.
- What is known as "warez"
files.
- Software serial numbers,
crackz, software for hacking, etc.
- Any other files not
mentioned above but considered illegal and/or unacceptable.
Such determination is to be made by Sanders Hosting.
FACT OF LIFE:
a web host is in no way responsible for the content in a customer's
web site, and thus will not protect you in anyway if you are
against the law.
Acceptable use of account
Customers on Sanders Hosting may not:
- Use their webspace
to store files that are not part of their web site (i.e. using
it as a backup location for your personal data or placing
files so that other web sites can link to them), or have big
or too many "orphaned" files. Orphaned files are
files that were once part of your web site, but not anymore.
Please do cleanups from time to time.
- Run scripts or have
CGIs that will consume an unacceptable amount of server resources
(CPU and/or RAM),
as this affects the overall performance of a server, and thus
affects other web sites. See
below.
- Users may not leave
any kind of software running on the server while user is not
logged in the system.
- No software related
to IRC may be used on our servers (this includes bots, downloaders,
etc.).
- Clients may not use
the account for excessive downloads through a user's shell
by means of FTP, web (Lynx) or download utilities (wget).
E-mail, spam
and mailing lists
"Spam" is the act of sending mass unsolicited advertising
(through any means, either email, USENET, ICQ, etc.) to users
that have not requested it. We do NOT tolerate spam. The account
of a customer found to be spamming will be terminated immediately
(even if the spam did not originated from our servers but it's
about advertising a web site or service on our servers) and
will be charged a "cleanup" fee of $30. Account termination
is done only after necessary research and after it is proved
that the customer indeed originated the spam. A violation of
this policy also includes any spam sent from outside our systems,
but still mentioning any web site within our systems.
Emails sent to other users should be respectful and considerate.
If it is proven that emails originating from a client is affecting
any other Internet user/organization in a negative way, then
the client will have his/her account terminated immediately.
Mailbombing, subscribing a user to a mailing list without his/her
authorization, the posting of outrageous messages to generate
response and/or cross posting to an excessive number of newsgroups
to bring traffic is forbidden by Sanders Hosting, and the general
Internet population.
Mailing lists provided by web sites must all include instructions
on how a receiver can unsubscribe from the mailing list. We
also request that all mailing lists deliveries be made between
3:00AM and 7:00AM EST, which are non-peak usage hours.
Users
with excessive usage of email will be monitored and might have
their email restricted if the user's usage of email is harmful
to the server's performance. This includes excessive email deliveries
due to a site that had web based email in a previous occasion
but is no longer offering such service (email addressed to previous
users will still arrive, sometimes reaching thousands of messages
per hour), a large number of undelivered messages bouncing back
to our servers as a result of poorly maintained mailing lists/delivery
lists, etc., and any other number of reasons that cause an excessive
and harmful amount of email usage.
Webspace usage
Contrary to popular belief, high quality webspace is not cheap.
Yes, a 100GB hard drive might cost around $150 (as of January
2003), but a 100GB RAID5 storage device costs over $1,000 (as
of January 2003). Because of this, the usage of webspace by
customers is constantly monitored. Here are the guidelines for
webspace usage:
- Customers may use
their webspace to ONLY store their web site.
- You may not download
files to your account (by using Lynx of wget), unless the
file is to become part of the web site.
- You may not store
personal files on your account. Webspace is not for personal
backups!
- All files on your
webspace must be linked to pages. That is, you may not have
"orphaned files" (files that are not part of the
web site). Please do maintenance from time to time and delete
files that are no longer used.
- Always delete temporary
files (like those created by wget).
- Do not store thousands
of files on a single directory. This slows down access to
the filesystem, and will make the delivery of your files slower.
CPU/RAM usage
The CPU/RAM consumption of a web site may in no way affect the
performance of a server. This means that the implementation
of CGIs on a web site must be carefully studied by the account's
owner. Examples of what can cause high CPU/RAM usage are:
- CGIs that handle too
much data from text files. An example of this is a message
board. The UBB (Ultimate Bulletin Board) is very known to
consume very high amounts of CPU anytime it has to handle
its flat file database (like when someone posts a message).
- Perl scripts constantly
executed consume a lot of server resources, since the Perl
interpreter must be launched each time the script is called.
Please read our CGI FAQ for information on how to prevent
this.
- Scripts with long
loops.
- Scripts that are constantly
calling a database and doing complex queries.
- Sites with traffic
in excess of 140,000
hits per day will consume plenty of CPU and RAM, since the
webserver has to handle more. No web sites with more than
140,000
hits/day will be accepted for shared hosting at Sanders Hosting.
Such web sites will need a dedicated server. Note: This policy
will apply to all accounts at Sanders Hosting.
- Web sites
with more than 140,000 hits per day can be accepted at special
rates. Contact our sales department for more information.
If a script (and its
instances) is found to be consuming too much CPU power (more
than 10% constantly) and/or RAM, and it's affecting the overall
performance of a server, Sanders Hosting has the right to move
the script, and warn the account's owner. The warning will consist
of a request to improve the performance of the script, or to
replace it by a more efficient one. If, the account's user pays
no attention to a warning (or several ones) and puts the script
back to work, Sanders Hosting has the right to delete the script
and change the account's password until the user complies. If,
after that, the user still pays no attention to the warning
and puts the script back, Sanders Hosting will delete the account.
No refunds for the current month of service will be given (advanced
payments will be refunded) and a $35 clean up fee might be charged.
Data
loss policy
Sanders Hosting is not responsible for any data loss and/or
damages that can incur due to such event. This includes data
loss caused by the user, lack of caution by the user (i.e.:
leaving your password written down where others can see it,
log in, and delete/steal your data), hardware/software/human
error, or a server security breach. Sanders Hosting is *very*
strict about server security, and it is something we monitor
constantly every day. We are also very good at maintaining hardware
in optimum conditions thanks to our years of extensive experience
in the server hardware industry.
FACT OF LIFE: Most web hosts pay no attention
to server security and constantly have security breaches. We
know this due to experience with other web hosts and their systems
(specially with major web hosts). Most don't apply security
patches and use default operating system installations (!!!).
Some leave ports open, unnecessary services running, etc. This
is not the case with Sanders Hosting. However, we can't guarantee
100% fool proof security (actually, no one can guarantee you
such a thing) since, as you might know, security bugs constantly
appear on all operating systems before solutions to them are
available.
Partial hosting
Partial hosting is the practice of having a web site on one
server, and having different sections of it on different web
hosts. For example, the web site on one web host, and its images
on another. Or, the front end to a script on one web host, and
its MySQL database backend on another. We do not allow a web
site on another web host to have parts of it on ours. This is
usually done by very high traffic customers, and of course,
their high traffic sections on our servers cause problems for
us. But if your site is on our servers, you can have parts of
it somewhere else (like chat rooms, email service, etc.).
Billing
All customers have 15 days to pay their accounts after their
accounts become due. Web access to the account will be blocked
if account is not paid within those 15 days. It will be deleted
after 30 days. Credit card chargebacks made by customers on
charges made by Sanders Hosting will incur a fee of $25, just
the same if a check sent by a customer bounces.
Bandwidth usage
If you are found to be exceeding the amount of bandwidth your
account allows then we will contact you and ask you to upgrade
your account or add extra bandwidth. If your site is using more
that 24GB of bandwidth per month then we will contact you on
an individual basis to determine a solution (possibly dedicated
server or pay per extra GB of bandwidth)
Free domain offer
All customers who register for a new account, will receive a
free domain name with their purchase of the account. This domain
name will be owned by the customer but Sanders Hosting will
be listed as the Technical, Administrator, and Billing contacts.
If the customer decides to leave in good
standing then the domain name will remain his, and all
contact information will be changed into his name. If the customer
leaves after staying with Sanders Hosting for less than 3 months
then a $15 fee will be billed via PayPal to settle the domain
name charge. If the customer refuses to pay this fee then the
ownership of the domain name will be turned over to Sanders
Hosting.
Unlimited email feature
The unlimited account features are not to be used to provide
your visitors with some kind of "free email" offer.
Doing so could kill a server, as thousands of people using email
at a time can crash the operating system due to the excessive
load, PLUS, their email messages will take a LOT of hard drive
space. Email accounts are only for the internal use of a web
site's staff.
Procedures
Sanders Hosting will proceed as necessary against any web sites
violating these policies, in any of the following ways:
- Sanders Hosting will
give you a warning (by email or phone) if we consider that
your policy violation is not of a serious matter.
- If you are found to
be distributing or storing "warez" software (for
example, a copy of Adobe Photoshop or MSOffice), then the
files will be deleted and we'll send you a warning. We'll
also charge you a "cleanup" fee of $30.
- Any obscene material
of the type graphic, racist or hate related, will be
deleted immediately and you will be charged a "cleanup"
fee of $30 with NO advanced notice. Any other obscene material
not of those types will mean an immediate warning.
- You will be given
an immediate warning if a copyright holder of some file you
are distributing contacts us for removal and submits evidence.
If the file is of the kind mentioned above in this section,
it will be deleted and information about you will be given
to the copyright holder if he/she/they request it. If it is
not of the type mentioned above, contact information about
the customer will be given to the copyright holder so that
a beneficiary agreement can be reached between both customer
and copyright holder.
- Warnings must be replied
within 36 hours. If not, clean up or termination of account
might follow.
- Any account that is
terminated will not be refunded the current month of service.
Months that have been paid in advanced will be refunded.
Refunds
Sanders Hosting offers a refund of any months of service you
have prepaid. By this, it is understood that:
- The current month
of service will not be refunded, but you will be refunded
any months of service you have prepaid.
- If you
applied for the "free domain offer" and you
cancel during the first 3 months from when the account is
created then a $15 charge will be billed to your account.
Domain
renewal policy
Sanders Hosting will take care of your domain's renewal fees,
as long as:
- You registered
the domain through Sanders Hosting, and you still have a web
hosting account at Sanders Hosting when the domain's renewal
date comes.
- The domain
is a .com, .net, .org, .us, .biz, .info, or .ws.
- You do
not leave Sanders Hosting for more than one month and come
back again before the domain's renewal time comes.
- You have
been with Sanders Hosting with an active web hosting account
for at least a year, even if the domain was not registered
through Sanders Hosting.
- You agree
to transfer your domain from your registrar (Network Solutions,
Register.com, etc) over to the registrar Sanders Hosting uses
if you did not registered that domain through Sander Hosting
(note this must be done 30 days before the domain becomes
due again, and is the responsibility of the customer).
Domain
registration policy
You may register any domain you want, as long as the domain
is not of a trademark owned by someone else (i.e.: you can't
register a domain like IBM.com even if it were available), however,
the ability to successfully register the domain does not make
you immune from objection to the use or registration of the
domain.
Our rights
Sanders Hosting has the right to deny business to a customer,
if this customer is:
- being rude to a member
of our staff,
- attempting
to re-open an account after the user's account has been previously
canceled due to a policy violation,
- constantly creating
problems on a server,
- constantly having
billing problems
- demanding or expecting
in a rude fashion more than what our service provides or what
we can do ("I want you to install X software for me.
Do it now or else", "I want more email accounts
for free. I'm the customer and you have to satisfy me. So
give me the extra email accounts", etc etc).
Always be polite. If
you are not, we have the right to no longer provide you with
web hosting service. If we decide to stop providing you service
due to any of these reasons, we'll give you service until the
end of your billing cycle so that you have time to move to a
new web host. If we consider the event to be too severe, the
account will be terminated immediately.
Note: Such a decision would be *FINAL*.
Sanders Hosting reserves the right to modify these policies
at any time.
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