Terms and Acceptable Usage Policy

ServerGrade is dedicated to providing an all-round top quality service. The terms and 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 term or condition will be grounds for immediate account deactivation without notice. ServerGrade 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 abuse of an account will be investigated, and will be grounds for immediate suspension.

To report suspected abuses or any violations of these policies, please contact abuse[at]ServerGrade.com.au

The following policies provide additional terms and conditions related to specific ServerGrade.com.au services we offer:

• Server Abuse Policy
• UCE / SPAM Policy
• Bandwidth Usage Policy
• Payment Policy
• Legal & Staff Policy
• Privacy Policy

Illegal Usage

ServerGrade 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. The subscriber to ServerGrade service agrees to indemnify and hold harmless ServerGrade from any claims resulting from the use of the service that damages the subscriber or any other party.

ServerGrade 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: Unauthorized access, use, probe, or scan of 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.

Chat Rooms

ServerGrade 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. ServerGrade does provide a choice of Java chat rooms which should meet most users' needs and run without hindering the performance of our servers.

Background Running Programs and Cron Jobs

ServerGrade does not allow background Daemons such as IRC bots; eggdrop; BitchX; XiRCON; and any other program that interferes with normal server operation.

IRC

ServerGrade does not allow IRC or IRC bots to be operated on our servers.

Backups

ServerGrade performs weekly backups on all servers to ensure that the chances of critical files being lost is minimal. However, ServerGrade 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 ServerGrade'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 ServerGrade to provide this knowledge or support outside matter specific to ServerGrade servers.

UCE (Unsolicited Commerce Email) - SPAM

Spamming, or the sending of mass unsolicited email, from or through a ServerGrade server or using an email address that is maintained on a ServerGrade machine is STRICTLY prohibited. ServerGrade 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 ServerGrade server as a maildrop 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 ServerGrade server or customer of ServerGrade is strictly prohibited. Any sub-networks of ServerGrade and dedicated servers must adhere to the above policies. The failure to meet or follow any of the above guidelines is ground enough for account deactivation. We reserve the right to remove any account without prior notice.

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. CPU, RAM, and MySQL connections may not exceed 10% of the server's resources over the course of a day, and may not overload the server during any traffic spikes.

Software Distribution

ServerGrade'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 tos[at]servergrade.com.au for special arrangement.

Multimedia Files and Hosting

Multimedia files are defined as any graphics, audio, and video files. ServerGrade web hosting accounts are not to be used for the purposes of distributing and storing unusual level of multimedia files to websites external to your account.

Actions Taken by ServerGrade

The failure by a customer to meet or follow any of the above policies/terms is ground for account deactivation. ServerGrade will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of the AUP. ServerGrade reserves the right to remove any account without prior notice.

When ServerGrade becomes aware of an alleged violation of its AUP, ServerGrade will initiate an investigation. During the investigation, ServerGrade may restrict a customer's access in order to prevent further potentially unauthorized activity. Depending on the severity of the violation, ServerGrade 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, ServerGrade will notify the appropriate law enforcement authorities of such violation.

ServerGrade does not issue credits for outages incurred through service disablement resulting from AUP violations.

ServerGrade customers agree to indemnify and hold harmless ServerGrade from any claims resulting from the use of our services that damages them or any other party. The ServerGrade 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. ServerGrade expressly disclaims any representation or warranty that the ServerGrade service will be error-free, secure or uninterrupted. No oral advice or written information given by ServerGrade, its employees, licensors or the like, will create a warranty; nor may you rely on any such information or advice. ServerGrade 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

ServerGrade 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.

Server Abuse Policy

ServerGrade allows dynamic content (Perl, PHP, Python, or ASP) to be used on all Virtual Servers and shared web hosting accounts. These can be resource intensive however, and because the server must be shared with other users, we must limit how much of the CPU / RAM / MySQL connections that can be used by any one account on a shared server. There are several reasons why ServerGrade has created its Server Abuse policy for it's users.

What does ServerGrade consider "server abuse"?

Any site whose content are using excessive amounts of system resources. Excessive amounts is defined as any amount that results in substantial degradation of server performance, or exceeding the average CPU and RAM usage for your account level by a factor of 10. ServerGrade is the sole determinant of what constitutes degraded server performance.

Due to their use of flat files instead of databases, ServerGrade 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. ServerGrade suggests using VBulletin or phpBB as a more efficient, database-driven alternative to these bulletin boards.

Why does ServerGrade 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, ServerGrade 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 be using excessive amounts of system resources will receive an email warning from ServerGrade. This warning will inform you that there is too much 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 accounts will be disabled. We can also disable your site without any email notice if found to be impacting other sites in a significant way, and action needs to be taken immediately.

TOS and AUP continued.