Acceptable Usage Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy governs the use of Vaccoda’s web hosting service. Violation of this policy may result in the suspension or termination of your hosting service.

The following is the entire Acceptable Use Policy agreement between Vaccoda Developments Limited (“Vaccoda”, “us”, “we” and “our”) and the personal or corporate account holder. We provide World Wide Web Hosting, website (“Web”) and script installation. We have certain legal and ethical responsibilities regarding the use of our servers and equipment involved in providing our customers with these services. Our general policy is to act as a provider of an internet presence. We reserve the rights to suspend or cancel a customer’s access to any or all of its services where we reasonably deem that the account has been inappropriately used.

What is appropriate usage?

Vaccoda’s hosting services are designed to serve the web hosting needs of small, medium and large businesses within the EU. We also provide our hosting services to large enterprises and internationally-based businesses with a sustained demand or high level of hosting usage, or for businesses with more specialist hosting requirements.

Our hosting service is reserved only for the use of Vaccoda clients, which means that a number of customers’ websites, email and/or storage services are hosted from the same server, which is known as “shared hosting”. We use abuse controls to help ensure that the use of our services does not adversely affect the performance of our system or other customers’ sites. Our hosting service is not appropriate to use a hosting account primarily as an online storage space or for archiving electronic files. For online file storage or archiving, our Vaccoda OwnCloud data storage service would be required.

Disk space

If you use your services consistently with our Hosting Terms & Conditions Of Service and this policy, your site can grow as large as necessary to meet your needs but, to ensure a great experience for all, we place some constraints on how fast you can grow and this is also dependent on the type of hosting solution you have with Vaccoda. The vast majority of our customers’ sites grow at rates well within our rules, but our abuse controls may cause a brief delay while we evaluate whether your particular plan is appropriate for your expansion needs or whether we need to increase your provision, which will incur additional monthly costs.

Vaccoda Customers may not initiate the following conditions as set out below. If any customer does violate these conditions, Vaccoda may terminate the account with no refund. Depending on the situation there will/won’t be warning notifications sent to you and us.

Our customers may not:

• use 25% or more of system CPU resources for longer than 90 seconds, or 1% of the server’s CPU resources for longer than 5 minutes. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include (but are not limited to) CGI scripts, FTP, PHP and HTTP activity;
• use of any kind of distributed computing software, including (but not limited to) SETI@home, Node Zero and Folding@home;
• run any type of interactive real-time chat applications that require extensive server resources, though remotely-hosted chat services are allowed;
• run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes (including all daemons) on the server;
• run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network;
• upload any excessively large files of any kind via FTP or the website Admin area;
• run any file sharing, bit torrent or other P2P network services, client or server software; or
• run any gaming servers.

Bandwidth

In most cases, if you use our services consistently with our Hosting Terms & Conditions Of Service, visitors to your website will be able to download and view as much content from your site as they like. However, in certain circumstances, our server processing power, server memory, or abuse controls could limit downloads from your site.

You are allocated a monthly bandwidth allowance. This allowance varies depending on your specific hosting requirements. Should your account pass the allocated amount of bandwidth, we may:

• suspend your account until the start of the next allocation period;
• suspend your account until more bandwidth is purchased at an additional fee;
• suspend your account until you upgrade your hosting plan;
• terminate your account; and/or
• charge you an additional fee for the overages.

Unused bandwidth in one month cannot be carried over to the next month.

Email storage

You do not have to worry about hitting an email storage limit if you use our services consistently with our Hosting Terms & Conditions Of Service and this Acceptable Use Policy. Vaccoda will increase your email storage space along with your appropriate small business needs, but our abuse controls may impact the rate of growth of your folder size, and there may be a short delay while we assess your usage. In some cases, creating additional folders or sub-folders will help ensure that the system works well for everyone. You will always be allowed to use as much disk space as is applied to your account.

Mailbox Trash Retention Policy

In order to keep your mail quotas under control and to prevent excessive disk utilisation, a mail retention policy is in place on your mailbox trash and spam folders. Emails will be automatically deleted from these folders if they have resided there for over 30 days.

Hosting provision

Our premium, managed hosting solutions come with the provision for up to 8 email accounts, discretionary sub-domains, databases and FTP accounts. All of our hosting solutions are based on the space allocation required for your website (which is variable within reason) and email accounts combined, with a standard fixed mailbox size of 500MB per mailbox. Further mailbox space can be purchased if required. We also include daily backups of your website and email account(s) within the monthly hosting fee.

Because our services use expensive, high standard, enterprise-level Google servers, we can offer low-cost hosting solutions by maximising our total server space and charging you a set fee for only the server space you require, with no additional server space quota given. Should you exceed your fair use quota, we may increase your monthly hosting fee to cover any excess space used. We will inform you of any increases in your monthly hosting charge beforehand.

If you reach your email storage space quota, you will receive quota warning emails which will require you to perform housekeeping on your email accounts (for example, removing large, unneeded, junk or deleted email items to free up space). If you wish to increase your quota allowance, additional charges will apply.

Your hosting space is strictly to be used for website data and email storage only.

Offensive content

You may not use Vaccoda’s services to publish, promote or transmit any content that Vaccoda reasonably believes:

• constitutes pornography;
• is excessively violent, incites or threatens violence or contains harassing content or hate speech;
• is unfair or deceptive under the consumer protection laws of any jurisdiction, including chain letters and pyramid schemes;
• is defamatory;
• violates another person’s privacy;
• creates a risk to a person’s safety or health;
• creates a risk to public safety or health;
• compromises national security;
• interferes with an investigation by any law enforcement agency;
• improperly exposes trade secrets or other confidential or proprietary information of another person;
• is intended to assist others in defeating technical copyright protections;
• infringes another person’s rights (including intellectual property rights);
• promotes or relates to illegal drugs, illegal gambling or illegal arms trafficking;
• violates any export control laws or sanctions;
• is illegal or solicits conduct that is illegal under laws applicable to you or to Vaccoda;
• is malicious, fraudulent or may result in retaliation against Vaccoda by offended viewers; or
• are proxy, warez, escrow, high-yield investment program (HYIP) or illegal gambling and/or lottery sites.

We may immediately suspend or terminate your hosting service, without notice and without refund, if we reasonably believe you are in breach of this section of this policy.

Security

As we offer a managed service, we are able to control the security of your hosting solution and administer any hosting related tasks on your behalf. This minimises the risk of any security breach or your website becoming compromised in any way.

However, if you require your FTP and PHPMyAdmin login details to pass on to a third party, we will only provide these after you have completed and returned our declaration and disclaimer.

Additionally, you must take your own reasonable security precautions. For example, you must securely store your usernames and passwords and keep this information confidential. If you need to change your password, please inform us and we will change your password for you.

Bulk and unsolicited emails

Bulk commercial emails, mailing lists and email reflectors are allowed on Vaccoda’s servers. However, we allow you to send a maximum of 50 emails per hour per account.

All emails sent from your Vaccoda account must adhere to the following rules:

• your intended recipients have given their consent to receive email via an affirmative means, such as an opt-in procedure;
• your procedures for soliciting consent include reasonable means to ensure that the person giving consent is the owner of the email address for which the consent is given;
• you may not obscure the source of your email in any manner;
• you must fully comply with the CAN SPAM Act and all other applicable laws; and
• you may not send any unsolicited email, either in bulk or individually, to any person who has indicated that they do not wish to receive it.

If you do not comply with the requirements of this section, we may suspend your account without notice while we conduct an investigation. Where we believe it appropriate, we may terminate your account without refund for failure to abide by these requirements.

These requirements apply to messages sent using your Vaccoda service and to messages sent from another network that directly or indirectly refer the recipient to a site hosted via your Vaccoda service. In addition, you may not use a third-party email service that does not practice similar procedures for all its customers.

Material protected by copyright

You may not publish, distribute or otherwise copy in any manner any music, software, art or other work protected by copyright law unless:

• you have the express permission of the copyright owner to do so; or
• you are otherwise permitted by United Kingdom or international copyright law or treaty to copy the work in that manner.

Vaccoda will terminate the service, without notice and without refund, of customers who repeatedly violate copyright laws.

Other

You must have valid and current contact information on file with your domain name registrar for any domain hosted using Vaccoda’s services. If we administer your domain name on your behalf, we will need to verify your contact details registered against your domain name from time-to-time to ensure all information is current.

Disclaimer

Vaccoda is under no duty, and does not by this Acceptable Use Policy undertake a duty, to monitor or police our customers’ activities and disclaims all responsibility for any misuse of the Vaccoda network by customers or third parties.

Internet abuse

When using our services, you may not engage in illegal, abusive or irresponsible behaviour, including (but not limited to):

• unauthorised access to or use of data, systems or networks, including any attempt to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of a system or network or to breach security or authentication measures (including those belonging to Vaccoda and its customers) without the prior written authorisation of the owner of the system or network;
• monitoring data or traffic on any network or system without the prior written authorisation of the owner of the system or network;
• interference with service to any user, host or network including (but not limited to) mail bombing, flooding, deliberate attempts to overload a system and broadcast attacks;
• use of an internet account or computer without the owner’s authorisation, including (but not limited to) internet scanning (tricking other people into releasing their passwords), password robbery, security hole scanning and port scanning;
• forging of any TCP-IP packet header or any part of the header information in an email or a newsgroup posting;
• any conduct that may result in retaliation against the Vaccoda network; or
• use of Vaccoda’s network in any way that unreasonably interferes with Vaccoda’s other customers’ use of the network.

We may immediately suspend or terminate your hosting service, without notice and without refund, if we reasonably believe you are in breach of this section of this policy.

Newsgroups, chat forums and other networks

You must comply with all rules and conventions for postings to any bulletin board, chat group or other forum in which you participate (such as IRC and USENET groups), including (but not limited to) their rules on content and commercial postings. These groups usually prohibit the posting of off-topic commercial messages or mass postings to multiple forums.

Hosting Terms & Conditions of Service

Please also see our Hosting Terms & Conditions of Service. Click here to read this.

Do you have a question?

If you have a question about this Acceptable Use Policy then please email us: info@vaccoda.com