Below, you'll find our Website Hosting Terms of Service. Please bookmark this page and check it for any changes. In addition to the terms, we have some rules for websites that host with us and we do this in order to make things very clear. The Website Hosting Rules and Website Hosting Terms of service on this page are subject to change.
Here are some items to note but please make sure you read this entire page:
These rules are in place so that we can continue to provide top quality website hosting to all of our clients. Basically, you should be a good neighbor.
Basically, you're in a more upscale neighborhood with our hosting. To keep things that way, these are the rules we need to have in place.
The use of services from Webstix [hereafter referred to as "Webstix"] constitutes agreement to these terms.
1.) Account Setup / Email on file
We will set up your account after we have received payment and we and/or our 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 we 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 (in Plesk - see the information in your welcome package) is current or up to date at all times. It is also your responsibility to ensure that the contact information for your domain account and your actual domain name(s) is correct and up-to-date.
2.) Content
All services provided by Webstix may only be used for lawful purposes. The laws of the State of Wisconsin and the United States of America apply.
The customer agrees to indemnify and hold harmless Webstix from any claims resulting from the use of our services.
Use of our 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 our hosting. If you believe that your copyright or trademark is being infringed upon, please email webmaster@webstix.com with the information required. If the request is of a licensing issue, we may require further documentation.
Webstix services, including all related equipment, networks and network devices are provided only for authorized customer use. Webstix 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 Webstix system(s) constitutes consent to monitoring for these purposes.
Any account found connecting to a third party network or system without authorization from the third party is subject to suspension. Access to networks or systems outside of your direct control must be with expressed written consent from the third party. Webstix may, at its discretion, request and require documentation to prove access to a third party network or system is authorized.
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Any material that, in our judgment, is obscene, threatening, illegal, or violates our terms of service in any manner may be removed from our servers (or otherwise disabled), with or without notice.
Failure to respond to email from our abuse department within 48 hours may result in the suspension or termination of your services. All abuse issues must be dealt with via troubleticket/email and will have a response within 48 hours.
Sites hosted on Webstix' service(s) are regulated only by U.S. law. Given this fact, and pursuant to Section 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act, we do not remove allegedly defamatory material from domains hosted on our service(s). The only exception to this rule is if the material has been found to be defamatory by a court, as evidenced by a court order. Webstix is not in a position to investigate and validate or invalidate the veracity of individual defamation claims, which is why we rely on the legal system and courts to determine whether or not material is indeed considered defamatory. In any case in which a court order indicates material is defamatory, libelous, or slanderous in nature; we will disable access to the material. Similarly, in any case in which a US Court has placed an injunction against specified content or material; we will comply and remove or disable access to the material in question.
The language of Section 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act fundamentally states that Internet services providers like Webstix and many of Webstixs other web hosting services and brands are republishers and not the publisher of content. Our service merely provides a hosting platform and space on which to host content, and any creation or publication of content on our services is the sole responsibility of the third-party user which creates or publishes the content. Therefore, Webstix should not be held liable for any allegedly defamatory, offensive or harassing content published on sites hosted under Webstix' web hosting service(s).
If in doubt regarding the acceptability of your site or service, please contact us at webmaster@webstix.com and we 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 (Lolita):
Any site found to host pornography, 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, we will notify you and allow time for you to change/update your password.
1b.) Hack Clean Up
If your website has been hacked or compromised, we will first contact you by email or phone. You have two options:
In either case, Webstix has the right to limit or take down access to your website at any time when a hack or compromise has been detected.
3.) Zero Tolerance Spam Policy
We take a zero tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited e-mail, bulk emailing, and spam. "Safe lists", purchased lists, and selling of 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 our servers. This provision includes, but is not limited to SPAM sent via fax, phone, postal mail, email, instant messaging, or usenet/newsgroups. Any account which results in our IP space being blacklisted will be immediately suspended and/or terminated.
Webstix 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.
Webstix 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 Webstix.
4.) Payment Information
You agree to supply appropriate payment for the services received from Webstix, in advance of the time period during which such services are provided. You agree that until and unless you notify Webstix of your desire to cancel any or all services received, those services will be billed on a recurring basis.
Cancellations must be done in writing (if you use email please be aware that your cancellation is not valid or final until you have received our email receipt of the cancellation). Once we receive your cancellation and have confirmed all necessary information with you via e-mail, we will inform you in writing (typically email) that your account has been canceled. If you have not received a reply in 24 hours you will need to contact us again via phone.
As a client of Webstix, it is your responsibility to ensure that your payment information is up to date, and that all invoices are paid on time. You agree that until and unless you notify Webstix of your desire to cancel any or all services received (by the proper means listed in the appropriate section of the Terms of Service), those services will be billed on a recurring basis, unless otherwise stated in writing by Webstix. Webstix reserves the right to bill your credit card or billing information on file with us. For a hosting account to be reinstated, there's a $100 setup fee for bringing your website back online in addition to whatever else is owed to Webstix for services rendered. Access to the account will not be restored until payment has been received.
Webstix reserves the right to change the monthly payment amount and any other charges at the end of each hosting period and you will be notified at least 15 day in advance of any such increases.
5.) Backups and Data Loss
Your use of this service is at your sole risk. Our backup service runs once a week, overwrites any of our previous backups made, and only one week of backups are kept. This service is provided to you as a courtesy. Webstix 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 Webstix servers.
6.) SLA (Service Level Agreement)
The Webstix SLA covers three components that support the availability of your website:
99.9% Network Uptime
We guarantee that our data center network will be available 99.9% of the time in a given month, excluding scheduled maintenance. The data center network means the portion of our host’s network extending from the outbound port on your edge device to the outbound port of the data center border router and includes our host’s managed switches, routers, cabling.
If requested, we will credit your account 2% of the monthly fee for each 30 minutes of network downtime, up to 100% of your monthly fee for the affected server.
Infrastructure
We guarantee that data center HVAC and power will be functioning 100% of the time in a given month, excluding scheduled maintenance. Power includes UPSs, PDUs and cabling, but does not include the power supplies on your servers. Infrastructure downtime exists when a particular server is shut down due to power or heat problems.
If requested, we will credit your account 2% of the monthly fee for each 30 minutes of infrastructure downtime, up to 100% of your monthly fee for the affected server(s).
Hardware
We guarantee the functioning of all server hardware components and will replace any failed component at no cost. "Hardware" means the processor(s), RAM, hard disk(s), motherboard, NIC card and other related hardware included with the server. Hardware replacement will begin once we identify the cause of the problem. Hardware replacement is guaranteed to be complete within one hour of problem identification.
If requested, we will credit your account 2% of the monthly fee per additional hour of downtime, up to 100% of your monthly fee for the affected server(s).
Credit Requests
To receive an SLA credit, Webstix hosting customers must contact their account manager.
7.) Cancellations and Refunds
Webstix reserves the right to cancel, suspend, or otherwise restrict access to the account at any time with or without notice.
Exchange rate fluctuations for international payments are constant and unavoidable. All refunds are processed in U.S. dollars, and will reflect the exchange rate in effect on the date of the refund. All refunds are subject to this fluctuation and Webstix is not responsible for any change in exchange rates between time of payment and time of refund.
Customers may cancel at any time. Webstix does not offer refunds for cancelled services, pro-rated or otherwise, for any reason unless agreed upon in advance and in writing.
To cancel your website hosting with us, your request must be sent to info@webstix.com or sent in writing to our mailing address. If you email us, we'll confirm your request to terminate hosting. If you do not receive an email back from us (or call us at (608) 277-7849) and you did not receive a confirmation email (or call), you should assume we did not receive your request, and you should email or call us again until we confirm.
Violations of the Terms of Service will waive the refund policy.
8.) Resource Usage
User may not:
1) 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.
2) Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
3) Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy) on shared servers.
4) Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
5) Run any bit torrent application, tracker, or client. You may link to legal torrents off-site, but may not host or store them on our shared servers.
6) Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities
7) Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc
8) Run cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes.
9) Run any MySQL queries longer than 15 seconds. MySQL tables should be indexed appropriately.
10) When using PHP include functions for including a local file, include the local file rather than the URL. Instead of include("https://yourdomain.com/include.php") use include("include.php")
11) To help reduce usage, do not force html to handle server-side code (like php and shtml).
12) Only use https protocol when necessary; encrypting and decrypting communications is noticeably more CPU-intensive than unencrypted communications.
9.) Bandwidth Usage
You are allocated a monthly bandwidth allowance. This allowance varies depending on the hosting package you purchase. As part of your premium hosting all limits for bandwidth and disk space are "soft" limits. "Soft" limits are for notification purposes only. If your account pass the allocated soft limit you will be notified via email. Webstix will then contact you to discuss your hosting options and adjust your limits. Your bandwidth or disk space will never be throttled or access limited because you exceed your limits. Unused bandwidth or disk space in one month cannot be carried over to the next month.
10.) SMTP Email Service
Webstix does not provide an outgoing (SMTP) server / service. Only incoming email is provided. Customer needs to provide their own SMTP service. This includes SMTP service (relaying) that is needed for IMAP email accounts.
11.) Indemnification
Customer agrees that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold Webstix harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and claims, including reasonable attorney's fees asserted against Webstix, 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 Webstix against liabilities arising out of; (1) any injury to person or property caused by any products sold or otherwise distributed in connection with Webstix; (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 Webstix' server.
12b.) Arbitration By using any Webstix services, you agree to submit to binding arbitration. If any disputes or claims arise against Webstix or its subsidiaries, such disputes will be handled by an arbitrator of Webstix' choice. An arbitrator from the American Arbitration Association or the National Arbitration Forum will be selected in the state of Wisconsin. Arbitrators shall be attorneys or retired judges and 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. The Federal Arbitration Act, and not any state arbitration law, governs all arbitration under this Arbitration Clause. You are also responsible for any and all costs related to such arbitration.
13.) Disclaimer & Liability
Webstix is not liable or damaged caused to hardware or software resulting from the use of the products produced, including website hosting, which may include HTML pages, PD files, images, and scripts. Webstix is not responsible or files lost due to server malfunctions for any reason including human error, negligence and carelessness. In no event shall Webstix be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss or use, data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of our services, including hosting services, even if advised of the possibility of such damage. Webstix does not warrant the software used, hosting services, is free of errors or bugs.Webstix 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 Webstix and its employees.
14.) Disclosure to law enforcement
Webstix may disclose any subscriber information to law enforcement agencies without further consent or notification to the subscriber upon lawful request from such agencies. We will cooperate fully with law enforcement agencies.
15.) Changes to the TOS
Webstix reserves the right to revise its policies at any time without notice.
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