Terms of Service, Acceptable Use, Privacy Policy, Domain Names

Our responsibilities

Our first goal is keeping your website and email up and running. We commit to an uptime of 99%... anything less and you will receive a daily credit (in the amount of 1/30th of your monthly bill) for each day your website or email are unavailable for a reason we could reasonably have prevented. We are not liable for any perceived or actual loss or damages to yourself, your business, or your reputation as a result of the unavailability of the services we provide you, even if we could reasonably have prevented the downtime. The realities of a shared hosting environment mean that on very rare occasions, the actions of one user may affect everyone on the server. If you need higher uptime, ask us about our dedicated server solutions.

Our next goal is keeping spam off the server. This is something we are constantly dealing with, given the rising tide of spam (did you know that approximately 80% of the emails received by the server are known spam and deleted immediately?) Because we pay for our bandwidth, we also pay for all the spam the server collectively receives. That means we spend a great deal of time and effort working to reduce spam coming to the server. We appreciate anything you can do to help too!

We are also committed (within reason) to keeping our server (both hardware and software) up-to-date. We purchased our new, customized server directly from Dell. To mitigate the risk of hard drive failure (the most common type of hardware failure), our drives are in a hot-swappable RAID 1 array. Many server software components are automatically updated, and others are updated manually as needed. In some cases, we may wait until known stability issues or other bugs are resolved, before implementing the latest updates and patches. We test all updates first before taking them live.

Your responsibilities

It should go without saying that we expect you not to use our server for any nefarious purpose, such as sending unsolicited bulk commercial email, launching attacks against other servers or websites, hosting malware or distributing viruses, sharing copyrighted material without permission of the rights holder, storing or sending any pornographic material with our server, or similar activities that are clearly not in the common good. We do not actively police our server, however all activities are logged (including unique identifiers such as IP address with date/timestamp). There are cases in which we would be obligated to provide these records in a court of law. Any abuse reports are taken seriously and may prompt a temporary account suspension pending investigation of the individual case. We are not liable for any loss or damages caused to others by your use of our server or the services we provide; we explicitly prohibit the use of our software or hardware to harm another entity in any way. If abuse is suspected, please report it to us immediately.

We make daily backups, however backing up your website and email is your responsibility. We are not liable for any loss or damages caused to you or to others by any loss of your data stored on our server.

If you install any web software on your website, please take the time to keep it up-to-date, especially where security updates are concerned. As soon as vulnerabilities are revealed, our server is automatically updated, but your individual site would still be at risk at such a time. Be proactive! A quick update every month or so is far easier than recovering a severely compromised (hacked) website.

We appreciate being paid in a timely fashion. We offer a ten business day grace period, after which we charge a late fee for that month (equal to 1/3rd of your monthly bill). We may suspend account services and technical support if an account is overdue. We do not issue service credits to accounts that are not in good standing.

Understanding why we may block access to our server

Occasionally automated rules on the server are triggered that block individuals from seeing any content we host on our server, including all websites and email. In these cases, the connection will "time out" when affected individuals try to access content on our server. This may happen after a number of failed logins from their IP address in quick succession, or their arrival from a site listed on our blacklist. It can even be triggered unbeknownst to the person, if his/her computer harbors malware that tries to access our server in a recognizably malicious way. If you think you (or someone you know) has been inadvertently blocked by our server, contact us with the IP address along with the time and date of the occurrence (if you are personally affected, you'll need to use someone else's connection to send us an email, or alternately give us a call).

Privacy

We will never share information you provide us with any third party without your consent, unless compelled to by a court of law, or as required by industry regulations (see the Domains section below). We do not store credit card numbers (online payments are processed via PayPal). Keep in mind that, as with any other managed hosting service, everything you upload to your website (whether or not you make it publicly available) is accessible to us because it is stored on our server, and each connection you make with our server (including the contents of email correspondence) is automatically logged along with unique identifiers (such as originating IP address along with the date and time). We respect your privacy and will never look through your email or website unless we have good reason to do so (for instance, if we suspect someone is using your account in ways explicitly prohibited above in Your Responsibilities, or if we are obliged to do so by a court of law).

Domain Names, WHOIS Privacy, Locking, Registration Agreement

Whenever we (or any other domain name provider) register a domain name, we're required by industry regulations to record accurate contact information (including mailing address, email address, telephone numbers, etc.) for the registrant. In order to protect your contact details, we enable WHOIS Privacy on all domains registered with us at no additional cost, so that your contact details will not be shown in the publicly available database known as the WHOIS database (which is used by both well- and ill-intentioned individuals.

Contact Privacy Inc. will show as the registrant on record, with a unique customer ID and email address associated with each domain name. Email and voice calls will be directed (by means of auto-reply in the case of email, and voice message in the case of a call) to a web contact form at http://contactprivacy.com (which includes a CAPTCHA to screen real inquiries before emailing you). Correspondence received by registered mail or traceable courier will be forwarded or scanned electronically and emailed to you; all other regular postal mail will be discarded or returned to the sender.

All domain names are locked by default in order to prevent unauthorized changes (such as transfers of ownership). The domain status will show as "clientTransferProhibited" and "clientUpdateProhibited" when queried via the WHOIS database. If you'd like to make changes to your domain, give us a buzz so we can unlock it first. Note that to transfer your domain away to another registrar, it will need to be both unlocked and unprotected by WHOIS Privacy. By registering a domain name with us, you agree to our Registration Agreement.

Trademark Information

and ITMUSTBE are registered service marks of ITMUSTBE, Inc. and BeeDrives are service marks of ITMUSTBE, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.