BizHosting is dedicated to providing an all-round top quality service. The terms and acceptable usage policy (AUP) which follows is necessary to ensure that we may continue to provide the best possible service to all of our customers, whilst at the same time satisfying our legal and ethical responsibilities.
Failure to follow any term or condition will be grounds for immediate account deactivation without notice. BizHosting will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of any of these provisions.
Activity which results in the suspension or deactivation of an account will result in a forfeiture of all fees paid. Complaints made regarding abuses of an account will be investigated and if found guilty will be grounds for immediate suspension.
To report suspected abuses or any violations of these policies, please Contact Us.
The following policies provide additional terms and conditions related to specific BizHosting services we offer.
Illegal Usage
BizHosting servers may be used for lawful purposes only. Transmission, storage, or distribution of any information, data or material in violation of any applicable law or regulation is prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to: copyrighted material, trademark, trade secret or other intellectual property right used without proper authorisation, and material that is obscene, defamatory, constitutes an illegal threat, or violates export control laws. Examples of non-acceptable content or links include, but are not limited to the following:
- Pirated software,
- Cracking programs or archives,
- Warez sites,
- MP3, and
- IRC bots.
The subscriber to BizHosting service agrees to indemnify and hold harmless BizHosting from any claims resulting from the use of the service that damages the subscriber or any other party.
BizHosting will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of this provision.
Adult Content
Due to special system and network requirements of adult oriented sites, pornography and sex-related merchandising are prohibited. This includes sites that may infer sexual content, or links to adult content elsewhere. This is also true for sites that promote any illegal activity or content that may be damaging to our servers or any other server on the Internet. Links to such materials are also prohibited.
Security
Violations of system or network security are prohibited, and may result in criminal and civil liability. Examples include, but are not limited to the following:
- Unauthorised access, use, probe, or scan of a systems security or authentication measures, data or traffic.
- Interference with service to any user, host or network including, without limitation, mail bombing, flooding, deliberate attempts to overload a system and broadcast attacks.
- Forging of any TCP-IP packet header or any part of the header information in an email or a newsgroup posting.
Server Resource
Any website that uses a high amount of server resources (such as, but not limited to, CPU time, memory usage, and network resources) will be given an option of either paying extra (which depends on the resource needed) or reducing the resource used to an acceptable level. BizHosting shall be the sole arbiter of what is considered to be a high server usage level.
Any hosting account deemed to be adversely affecting the server performance or the network integrity will be shut down without prior notice.
Chat Rooms
BizHosting does not allow clients to install their own chat rooms. Chat rooms tend to be large system hogs and we cannot permit it as an account option. BizHosting may provide a choice of Java chat rooms which should meet most users’ needs and run without hindering the performance of the machine of our servers.
Background Running Programs and Cron Jobs
BizHosting does not allow background Daemons such as IRC bots; eggdrop; BitchX; XiRCON; and any other program that interferes with normal server operation.
IRC
BizHosting does not allow IRC or IRC bots to be operated on our servers.
Backups
BizHosting performs weekly backups on all servers to ensure critical files are never lost. However BizHosting is NOT responsible for lost data, time, income or any other resource due to faulty backups or non-existent backups.
Client Responsibility
The client is responsible for all activity originating from the account unless proven to be a victim of outside hacking or address forgery. The client is responsible for securing their username/password. The client assumes responsibility for all material on their site that may be put on by a third party (such as the usage of Free For All links pages). Use of BizHosting’s service requires a certain level of knowledge in the use of Internet languages, protocols, and software. This level of knowledge varies depending on the anticipated use and desired content of the web space by the client. The following examples are offered:
- Web Publishing: requires knowledge of HTML, properly locating and linking documents, FTPing Web contents, Graphics, text, sound, image mapping, etc.
- CGI-Scripts: requires a knowledge of the UNIX environment, TAR & GUNZIP commands, Perl, CShell scripts, permissions, etc.
- Mail: a use of mail clients to receive and send mail, etc.
The client agrees that he or she has the necessary knowledge to create and maintain their web space. Client agrees that it is not the responsibility of BizHosting to provide this knowledge or support outside matter specific to BizHosting servers.
UCE (Unsolicited Commerce Email) – SPAM
Spamming, or the sending of mass unsolicited email, from or through a BizHosting server or using an email address that is maintained on a BizHosting machine is STRICTLY prohibited. BizHosting will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of this provision. If you engage in any of the foregoing activities using the service of another ISP or IPP, but channeling activities through a BizHosting server as a mail-drop for responses, you are in violation. Violators will be assessed a minimum of $500.00 fine and will face an immediate suspension.
Server abuse
Any attempts to undermine or cause harm to a BizHosting server or customer of BizHosting is strictly prohibited. Any sub-networks of BizHosting and dedicated servers must adhere to the above policies. The failure to meet or follow any of the above guidelines are grounds for account deactivation. We reserve the right to remove any account without prior notice.
Software Distribution
BizHosting’s shared Web Hosting accounts are not to be used for the purposes of distributing software and multimedia products. If you wish to distribute software and/or multimedia files, please contact support@BizHosting.com.au for special arrangement.
Multimedia Files
Multimedia files are defined as any graphics, audio, and video files. BizHosting Web Hosting accounts are not to be used for the purposes of distributing and storing unusual amount of multimedia files. Any Web site whose disk space usage for storing the multimedia files exceed 70% of its total usage, either in terms of total size or number of files, will be deemed to be using unusual amount of multimedia files.
Actions Taken by BizHosting
The failure by a customer to meet or follow any of the above policies/terms is grounds for account deactivation. BizHosting will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of the AUP. BizHosting reserves the right to remove any account without prior notice.
When BizHosting becomes aware of an alleged violation of its AUP, BizHosting will initiate an investigation. During the investigation, BizHosting may restrict a customer’s access in order to prevent further potentially unauthorised activity. Depending on the severity of the violation, BizHosting may, at its sole discretion, restrict, suspend, or terminate a customer’s web hosting account and/or pursue other civil remedies. If such violation is a criminal offence, BizHosting will notify the appropriate law enforcement authorities of such violation.
BizHosting does not issue credits or refunds for outages incurred through service disablement resulting from AUP violations.
Indemnification
BizHosting customers agree to indemnify and hold harmless BizHosting from any claims resulting from the use of our services that damages them or any other party. The BizHosting service is provided on an as is, as available basis without warranties of any kind, either express or implied, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. BizHosting expressly disclaims any representation or warranty that the BizHosting service will be error-free, secure or uninterrupted. No oral advice or written information given by BizHosting, its employees, licensor or the like, will create a warranty; nor may you rely on any such information or advice. BizHosting and its partners and suppliers will not be liable for any cost or damage arising either directly or indirectly from any transaction or use of the service.
Modification
BizHosting reserves the right to add, delete, or modify any provision of this Policy at any time without notice.
Refusal Of Service
We reserve the right to refuse, cancel, or suspend service at our sole discretion.
CGI Abuse Policy
BizHosting allows CGI to be used on all Virtual Servers. CGI can be resource intensive however, and because a Virtual Server must be shared with other users, we must limit how much of the CPU can be used by any one account on a shared server. There are several reasons why BizHosting has created its CGI Abuse policy for its virtual server users.
What does BizHosting consider “CGI ABUSE”?
Any site whose CGI programs are using excessive amounts of system resources. Excessive amounts is defined as any amount that results in substantial degradation of server performance. BizHosting is the sole determinant of what constitutes degraded server performance.
Due to their use of flat files instead of databases, BizHosting does not allow the use of UBB or YABB bulletin boards. Use of these boards for large or very active forums, results in system performance degradation, and cannot be allowed in our shared server environment. BizHosting suggests using VBulletin or phpBB as a more efficient, database-driven alternative to these bulletin boards.
Why does BizHosting have this policy?
Server Speed and Fairness to others. A Virtual Server is shared. As such, there are many accounts per machine. In all fairness, BizHosting cannot allow one or two clients to use all of the System resources on a shared machine and have all other clients on the machine suffer because of it. Excessive CPU usage by one or more clients causes extreme slowness in all areas: FTP, Telnet, Web Sites and more. If the CPU usage gets too far out of hand, all sites hosted on the machine will return Errors and not be accessible in any way.
What happens if I violate this policy?
All accounts that are found to using excessive amounts of system resources will receive an email warning from BizHosting. This warning will inform you that there is too much CGI running and it will provide options for reducing the usage or upgrading your server. If you do not reduce the usage within 24 hours of the email being sent, your CGI scripts will be disabled. We can also disable your site without any email notice.
Bandwidth Usage Policy
While purchasing a hosting account with BizHosting, you are allotted a portion of bandwidth per month. You can use this bandwidth for anything you want besides things not permitted as outline in the Terms & AUP. If you go over your allotted amount of bandwidth in a given month, your account may be suspended by Server Monitoring Softwares automatically, and you will be expected to pay for the additional bandwidth.
We provides a bandwidth estimate figure in your control panel. This is an estimate and is provided from the server level. Actual account bandwidth usage is measured for billing purposes at the port level. This policy exists because many users offer files for download via FTP which is not otherwise measured by the server directly at this time. Please note that because the bandwidth is monitored at the port, any and all traffic for your Web Site is tracked including, but not limited to: FTP uploads and downloads, mail sending and retrieval, normal Web traffic, etc. Everything that is pushed from our server to a third-party’s machine is considered bandwidth and will be measured.
We have designed this policy because many users find that hosts offer “unlimited” bandwidth only to find out that it has a very real bandwidth limit. Further, they place restrictions on what you can use the bandwidth for (i.e. no image galleries because they are a large source of bandwidth consumption). We tell you up-front how much bandwidth you are allocated each month and you have the full amount to use.
If you are unsure of your bandwidth usage prior to moving your site to BizHosting, contact us. We would be happy to review your current site statistics with you to help you choose the right package.