HostIcon provides Internet World Wide Web page hosting and e-mail services. HostIcon has certain legal and ethical responsibilities regarding the use of its computer network and equipment involved in these services.
HostIcon’s general policy is to act as a neutral provider of access to the global Internet and has specific ethical concerns regarding the use of its computers detailed below. HostIcon reserves the right to suspend or cancel a customer’s access to any or all services provided by HostIcon when HostIcon decides that the account has been inappropriately used.
Specific Acceptable Use Policies
Unauthorized use of other people’s accounts or computers
HostIcon will strongly react to any use or attempted use of an Internet account or computer without the owner’s authorization. Such attempts include ‘social engineering’ (tricking other people into releasing their passwords), password cracking, security hole scanning etc.
Any unauthorized use of accounts or computers by a HostIcon customer, whether or not the attacked account or computer belongs to HostIcon, will result in action against the attacker. Possible actions include warnings, account suspension or cancellation, and civil or criminal legal action, according to the seriousness of the attack.
Adult Sites
Adult-oriented sites, pornography and sex-related merchandising are prohibited. This includes sites that may infer sexual content of any kind or provide links to adult content elsewhere. We also prohibit sites that provide storage, sale, distribution, hypertext link to, advertisement, promotion or hosting of material that is unlawful, defamatory, obscene, harmful, threatening, harassing, or an intrusion of privacy or publicity rights, or otherwise objectionable.
Child Pornography
The use of HostIcon’s services to store, post, display, transmit, advertise or otherwise make available child pornography is prohibited. HostIcon is required by law, and will, notify law enforcement agencies when it becomes aware of the presence of child pornography on, or being transmitted through, its services.
Usage of Server Resources on our Windows Standard Hosting Plans:
Customer agrees that Customer shall not use excessive amounts of server resources (such as, but not limited to, CPU time &amp memory usage) on any of HostIcon’s servers. Any violationof this policy may result in corrective action by HostIcon, including assessment of additional charges, disconnection or discontinuance of any and all Services, or termination of this Agreement, which actions may be taken in HostIcon’s sole and absolute discretion. If HostIcon takes any corrective action under this section, Customer shall not be entitled to a refund of any fees paid in advance prior to such action.
Users may not initiate the following:
a) Use too much of system resources There are numerous activities that could cause such problems these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.
b) Use no more than 500 MB / day bandwidth by single domain.
c) Run any type of interactive real-time chat applications that require server resources. Remotely-hosted services are fully allowed.
d) Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
e) Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
f) Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1492, etc
Traffic Policy on our Windows Standard Hosting Plans:
HostIcon allows for very generous traffic, and most sites never exceed 500MB per day, unless they offer shareware, sound, video, image and multimedia archives, are mirror sites or any site whose primary purpose is file distribution. HostIcon customers are discouraged from storing any files that cause excessive traffic on HostIcon servers. 99% of the sites do not fall into this category and never reach our traffic limits.
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason not prohibited by law. Also we reserve the right to terminate service to any customer for any reason not prohibited by law.
Any deliberate attempt to cause damage to HostIcon or any other Internet servers will result in immediate account deactivation without prior notice. No refund is given in this case.
No mass email marketing or free email businesses allowed
We do not allow mass email marketing sites on our servers. It doesn’t matter if it’s opt_in email marketing. We simply do not allow sites of that nature to be hosted on this shared environment. Sites such as ‘safe lists’ and ‘free email’ are also strictly prohibited. We reserve the right to shutdown such sites, that we consider harmful to the server’s performance.
Commercial advertisements with e-mail
Sending unsolicited bulk and/or commercial messages over the Internet (known as ‘spamming’) is prohibited, regardless of whether or not it overloads a server or disrupts service to HostIcon’s customers. The term ‘spamming’ also includes, but is not limited to, maintaining an open SMTP policy, engaging in spamming using the service of another ISP or IPP and referencing in the spam a Web site hosted on a HostIcon server, and selling or distributing software (on a Web site residing on a HostIcon server) that facilitates spamming. Violators will be assessed a minimum fine of $200 and will face immediate suspension. HostIcon reserves the right to determine, in its sole and absolute discretion, what constitutes a violation of this provision.
Email limits on our Windows Standard Hosting Plans:
These limitations apply to ALL email accounts, mailing lists and anything else that you use to send email using your HostIcon account.
The limits have been introduced in order to clearly define what is permissable and to provide a stable platform for all users. These limits apply to each Account account. The combined total of all email received/sent via your account/mail lists must not exceed these figures:
A Maximum of 10 recipients per email is permitted.
A Maximum of 100 emails per hour is permitted.
A Maximum of 500 emails per 24 hour period, per user account is permitted.
If your mailings exceed these limits, you are likely to recieve the emails back into your inbox as undeliverable.
If your mailing list Would / Does exceed these limits, then you would need to outsource the list to a 3rd party provider.
HostIcon no longer hosts sites that deal with mass email type services. Failing to observe the above limits will result in the mail list software being disabled or having your account suspended.
Abuse of Traffic and Storage on our Windows Standard Hosting Plans::
HostIcon customers are privileged to be offered high traffic and large amounts of storage for their web sites. We expect our customers to use these resources in good faith. The intention of HostIcon is to provide a large space to serve web documents, not an offsite storage area for electronic files. Sites that fall under ‘storage area’ are large archives of images, compressed files, movies, or sound files. HostIcon allows up to 50 megs of archive storage per active account, ie. movies, sound files (including mp3, real audio files), images, compressed files, Real Audio or Video archives etc. we reserve the right to remove the abusive files.
To prevent abuse
a) HostIcon’s web space must be used as a facility for web hosting only
b) HostIcon’s storage must not be used as a facility for backup purposes
c) All non-HTML files must be referenced by HTML files. All web pages (HTML) must be ‘linked’ with all files (.gif, .jpeg, .exe, etc.) stored on HostIcon’s servers. Web sites that are found to contain no html documents or a number of unlinked files are subject to warning, suspension or cancellation at the discretion of HostIcon management.
HostIcon email accounts may not be used for permanent storage of email, and must be cleared periodically. In other words, don’t click the ‘leave mail on server’ box found in many popular email clients and/or if You use WebMail delete your email.
HostIcon will remove all emails older than 90 days. HostIcon will terminate pop3 account if there will be more than 1000 emails in pop3 account. HostIcon will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of this provision.
Customer agrees to pay for additional generated transfer over his/her account limit.
Customer shall be charged according to our current price list posted on the Hosting page of this web site.
Abuse of Traffic and Storage, Resource Usage on our Linux Shared Hosting Plans:
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.
Users are strongly recommended to:
9) When using PHP include functions for including a local file, include the local file rather than the URL. Instead of include(‘http://yourdomain.com/include.php’) use include(‘include.php’)
10) To help reduce usage, do not force html to handle server-side code (like php and shtml).
11) Only use https protocol when necessary encrypting and decrypting communications is noticeably more CPU-intensive than unencrypted communications.
INODES
The use of more than 250,000 inodes on any shared account may potentially result in a warning first, and if no action is taken future suspension. Accounts found to be exceeding the 100,000 inode limit will automatically be removed from our backup system to avoid over-usage, however databases will still be backed up. Every file (a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode.
Sites that slightly exceed our inode limits are unlikely to be suspended however, accounts that constantly create and delete large numbers of files on a regular basis, have hundreds of thousands of files, or cause file system damage may be flagged for review and/or suspension. The primary cause of excessive inodes seems to be due to users leaving their catchall address enabled, but never checking their primary account mailbox. Over time, tens of thousands of messages (or more) build up, eventually pushing the account past our inode limit. To disable your default mailbox, login to cPanel and choose ‘Mail’, then ‘Default Address’, ‘Set Default Address’, and then type in: :fail: No such user here.
Bandwidth Usage on our Linux Shared Hosting Plans:
You are allocated a monthly bandwidth allowance. This allowance varies depending on the hosting package you purchase. Should your account pass the allocated amount we reserve the right to suspend the account until the start of the next allocation, suspend the account until more bandwidth is purchased at an additional fee, suspend the account until you upgrade to a higher level of package, terminate the account and/or charge you an additional fee for the overages. Unused transfer in one month cannot be carried over to the next month.
Dedicated Servers
HostIcon reserves the right to reset the password on a dedicated server if the password on file is not current so that we may do security audits as required by our datacenter. It is the responsibility of the client to ensure that there is a valid email address and current root password on file for their dedicated server on file to prevent downtime from forced password resets. HostIcon reserves the right to audit servers as needed and to perform administrative actions at the request of our datacenter. Dedicated servers are NOT backed up by us and it is the responsibility of the client to maintain backups or configure backups to their secondary hard drive as the simplest solution. Please contact sales@hosticon.com if you would like us to configure backup for you.
Fraudulent Content
Offering or distributing any fraudulent goods, services, schemes or promotions (e.g. – make money fast schemes, chain-letters, pyramid schemes), or submitting false data on any sign-up form, contract or online application through registration, or any fraudulent use of information obtained through the use of the Plans, including, without limitation, use of credit card numbers, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, or home addresses is strictly prohibited.
Prohibited Sites and links
HostIcon do not host
a) Pirated software
b) Hacker programs or archives
c) Warez sites
d) Online gambling
e) Financial sites (such as bank, brokerage) without verification of accreditation and company papers. Company has to be verified by us prior to account activation.
Any illegal activity, including adult content, links to adult content web sites, online gambling, spamming or hacking will result in your site being shut down.
HostIcon will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of this provision.
Not allowed scripts and applications
IRC software. We do not allow running any IRC related software, programs or services. This includes but not limited to: IRC servers, IRC clients, IRC bouncers, IRC proxy, IRC bots, and other related software.
Background process. We do not allow any kind of background running software, programs or services.
Any kind of proxy server. It is not allowed to run any kind of proxy server whether it is running as a background process, CGI scripts or any other means. This includes all kind of proxy servers for any protocol.
Backups
HostIcon’s shared / reseller hosting accounts include a weekly backup service, however these backups are for HostIcon’s administrative purposes only, and are in NO WAY GUARANTEED! Clients/ Resellers and their customers are responsible for maintaining their own backups on their own personal computers. HostIcon does not provide any sort of compensation for lost or incomplete data in the event that backups do not function properly. We will do our best to ensure complete and accurate backups, but assume no responsibility for this duty. Always back your site up to your personal computer! We make no guarantees about the availability of backups.
Any shared account using more than 20 gigs of disk space will be removed from our off site weekly backup with the exception of Databases continuing to be backed up. All data will continue to be mirrored to a secondary drive which helps protect against data loss in the event of a drive failure.
Account Cancellation and Refund Policy
All accounts are set-up on a pre-pay basis and all fees paid. All pricing is guaranteed for the term of pre-payment. HostIcon reserves the right to change the prices of any of its services at any time.
All HostIcon’s accounts are setup on monthly/ annually/ biannually/triannually billing cycles which you can choose upon singup or change later by contacting us. Your particular billing cycle corresponds to the contract length that was initially chosen at setup so your renewal invoice will be generated at this length. To renew your account, you have to manually pay for the renewal invoice from hosticon customer login from https://hosticon.com/client because we do not charge automatically or store your card information and you will be redirected to your preferred payment gateway to make payment manually.
The renewal invoice will be automatically generated prior to 30 days of your renewal date for the annually, biannually, and triannually billing cycle.
Submit your cancellation request from your client area http://www.hosticon.com/client/ go to my product and services at the bottom you will see the account cancellation request link. Once the cancellation request is submitted, your invoice will be immediately canceled by the system and your hosting account will be scheduled for termination.
All of HostIcon web hosting packages are backed by a 30 day money back guarantee. If you are not completely satisfied with our services or support within the first 30 days of your signup, you will be given a full refund in the original mode of payment. No refund is available after the 30 day.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Make 100% sure that you have copies of all your files before you submit a request for us to cancel your account. As soon as you submit your request to cancel your account, we stop the recurring transactions from our billing system, and then delete your account from the server.
Third Party Accountability
HostIcon client will be held responsible and accountable for any activity by third parties, using their account, that violates guidelines created within the Terms of Service.
Lawful Purpose
HostIcon reserves the right to refuse service to anyone. Customers may only use HostIcon’s server for lawful purpose. Transmission of any material in violation of any Federal, State or Local regulation is prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to copyrighted material, material legally judged to be threatening or obscene, and material protected by trade secrets.
Indemnification
Customer agrees that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold HostIcon harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and claims, including reasonable attorney’s fees asserted against HostIcon, 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 HostIcon against liabilities arising out of:
1. any injury to person or property caused by any products sold or otherwise distributed in connection with HostIcon’s server
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 customer from HostIcon’s server.
You may view our Privacy Policy here
HostIcon reserves the right to revise its policies at any time without notice.