MellowHost is dedicated to providing top quality service at a very affordable price. The conditions which follow are 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 condition will be grounds for immediate account deactivation without notice. MellowHost 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 management.
Illegal Usage
MellowHost 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 authorization, and material that is obscene, defamatory, constitutes an illegal threat, or violates export control laws. Examples of non-acceptable content or links: Pirated software, Hackers programs or archives, Warez sites, MP3, and IRC bots. Any type of forum/discussion board discussing where to obtain such files or one that distributes the files is also prohibited. The subscriber to MellowHost service agrees to indemnify and hold harmless MellowHost from any claims resulting from the use of the service that damages the subscriber or any other party. MellowHost will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of this provision.
Illegal Content
MellowHost does not allow background Daemons such as IRC bots; eggdrop; BitchX; XiRCON; and any other program that interferes with normal server operation. No warez is allowed. Web proxies are not tolerated. This includes NPH-Proxy, and web proxy. If your site is found to hold any proxy files, your account will be suspended and the account holder will be issued a fee of $50 USD. When using an account with shell, you are not allowed to run ANY servers or services on the MellowHost network. Servers are defined as perlbots, proxies, BitchX, psyBnc, root exploits, DDoS scripts, Shoutcast servers, etc. Running any of these will face an immediate suspension, and users will be subject to a fine no less than $50.00 USD, and no more than $100.00 USD. MellowHost reserves the right to terminate an account for these activities also.
Software Distribution
MellowHost’s 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 our sales for special arrangement.
File Usage and Storage
MellowHost web hosting accounts are not to be used for the purposes of distributing and/or storing an unusual amount of files. We are a web hosting service not a remote file storage service. Any web site whose disk space usage for storing the 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 files. At that point, if we find that those files are illegal or harmful in any way, you will be notified. If you do not have any negative intentions such as causing harm to our server or to others with the files you keep, then you have nothing to worry about.
Chat Rooms
MellowHost does not provide nor allow chat rooms on shared hosting enviroments. You may elect for a VPS to run a chat room efficiently.
IRC
MellowHost does not allow IRC or IRC bots to be operated on our shared or reseller servers. They are not allowed in VPS packages either.
Security
Users are prohibited from violating or attempting to violate the security of the MellowHost Network. Violations of system or network security may result in civil or criminal liability. MellowHost will investigate occurrences, which may involve cooperation with law enforcement authorities in prosecuting Users who are involved in such violations. These violations include, without limitation:
1) Accessing data not intended for such user or logging into a server or account, which such user is not authorized to access,
2) Attempting to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of a system or network or to breach security or authentication measures without proper authorization,
3) Attempting to interfere with service to any user, host or network, including, without limitation, via means of overloading, flooding, mail bombing‚crashing.,
4) Forging any TCP/IP packet header or any part of the header information in any e-mail or forum posting,
5) Taking any action in order to obtain services to which such User is not entitled,
6) Attempting to couple many hosting packages together to take advantage of massive space or bandwidth allocations,
Each hosting package purchased is unique to a do main name and use – you are not allowed to purchase multiple plans to obtain combined bandwidth & space. MellowHost will stop such transactions and label them as deceptive. We have an upgrade path for all services and we can often times work out special deals for users if they ask us for the assistance.
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: Unauthorized 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 Abuse
Any attempts to undermine or cause harm to a MellowHos server or customer of MellowHos is strictly prohibited. Any sub-networks of MellowHost 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.
Free Hosting Sites
Mellowhost believes in the freedom of hosting. We do allow our users to run Free Hosting sites, though for having lots abuses and resources delegation mellowhost reserves the rights to set a limit over an account if abuse department approves the account as a FREE HOSTING PROVIDER. Usually for a free hosting provider a 200 domains limit is eligible if and only if the provider is a TLD Free domain hosting provider, if the provider is a subdomain hosting (FREE) then we do not accept those services. This policy includes for the provider like co.cc, uni.cc etc. We do not block free hosting services like other hosting providers though, for abuse and resource limitation on a premium server this policy is applied.
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 MellowHost’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. FrontPage web publishing: knowledge of the FrontPage tools as well as Telnet and FTP understanding and capability. 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 MellowHost to provide this knowledge or support outside matter specific to MellowHost servers.
Backups
MellowHost takes extreme steps to maintain system integrity. However, MellowHost shall not be held responsible for loss of data due to any cause. To ensure the highest level of data protection, MellowHost recommends that ALL information be backed up on your own computer. As with any data that you hold a high importance to, it should be in more than one location at all times. All MellowHost data backups are designed against hardware failure not customer user error.
Actions
The failure by a customer to meet or follow any of the above policies/terms is grounds for account deactivation. MellowHost will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of the AUP. MellowHost reserves the right to remove any account without prior notice.
When MellowHost becomes aware of an alleged violation of its AUP, MellowHost will initiate an investigation. During the investigation, MellowHost may restrict a customer’s access in order to prevent further potentially unauthorised activity. Depending on the severity of the violation, MellowHost 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 offense, MellowHost will notify the appropriate law enforcement authorities of such violation.
MellowHost does not issue credits for outages incurred through service disablement resulting from AUP violations.
MellowHost customers agree to indemnify and hold harmless MellowHost from any claims resulting from the use of our services that damages them or any other party. The MellowHost 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. MellowHost expressly disclaims any representation or warranty that the MellowHost service will be error-free, secure or uninterrupted. No oral advice or written information given by MellowHost, its employees, licensors or the like, will create a warranty; nor may you rely on any such information or advice. MellowHost 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
MellowHost 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. An example of refusal of service is if an account continues to abuse our policies after warnings. Refusal, cancellation or suspension of services especially holds true to issues with spam or any script abuse. Another example of refusal of service is if a customer becomes very unreasonable, unprofessional, extremely difficult to work with or threatening. Said customer’s account will be suspended and we will recommend to the customer to find a new host. A backup of the account(s) will be provided.
Resource Abuse Policy (RAP)
Any website on our shared servers that uses a high amount of server resources (CPU, memory usage, and network resources) will be given an option to pay for a dedicated server. The abuse and misuse of system resources is a serious problem, and MellowHost does not tolerate it. Accounts on a shared server must be shared with other users, so we must limit how much of the CPU and memory that can be used by any one account.
In all fairness, we cannot allow one or two clients to use all of the system resources on a shared machine and have all other clients suffer because of it. Excessive CPU & memory usage by one or more clients causes extreme slowness in all areas: MySQL, Email, HTTP and more. If the CPU & memory usage by a few clients gets out of hand, all sites hosted on the machine will return errors and not be accessible in any way.
AVERAGE SERVER RESOURCE LIMITS
1 CPU Core
5MB/sec I/O
20 Concurrent connections
1GB Memory
100 Processes
25 MySQL Connections
There are special exceptions to these rules to be determined at the time we discover abuse. There are different combinations of usage that can create problems and other special cases. At any given time a server is unstable and an account is found to be the cause, we reserve the right to suspend the account to keep the server online and operating normally. If the usage is an increasing trend, we recommend the user invest in a dedicated server so the website can grow at a normal rate without restriction.
