The use of services from 1st-host.co.za, [hereafter referred to as "First Host"] constitutes agreement to these terms.

1.) Account Setup / Email on file
We  will setup your account after we have received payment and we have  screened the order in case of fraud. It is your responsibility to  provide us with an email address which is not @ the domain you are  signing up under. If there is ever an abuse issue or we need to contact  you, the primary email address on file will be used for this purpose. It is your responsibility to ensure the email address on file is current  or up to date at all times. If you have a domain name registered with  First Host, it is your responsibility to ensure that the contact  information for your domain account and your actual domain name is  correct and up-to-date. First Host is not responsible for a lapsed  registration due to outdated contact information being associated with  the domain. If you need to verify or change this information, you should contact us. Providing false contact information of any kind may result in the termination of your account.

2.) Content
All services provided by First Host may only be used for lawful purposes.

The customer agrees to indemnify and hold harmless First Host from any claims resulting from the use of our services.

Use of our services to infringe upon any  copyright or trademark is prohibited. This includes but is not limited  to unauthorized copying of music, books, photographs, or any other  copyrighted work. The offer of sale of any counterfeit merchandise of a  trademark holder will result in the immediate termination of your  account. Any account found to be in violation of anothers copyright will be expeditiously removed, or access to the material disabled. Any  account found to be in repeated violation of copyright laws will be  suspended and/or terminated from our hosting. If you believe that your  copyright or trademark is being infringed upon, please contact us.

Using your account as a backup/storage  device is not permitted, with the exception of one cPanel backup of the  same account. Please do not take backups of your backups.
Examples of unacceptable material on all our servers include:

First Host services, including all  related equipment, networks and network devices are provided only for  authorized customer use. First Host systems may be monitored for all  lawful purposes, including to ensure that use is authorized, for  management of the system, to facilitate protection against unauthorized  access, and to verify security procedures, survivability, and  operational security. During monitoring, information may be examined,  recorded, copied and used for authorized purposes. Use of First Host  system constitutes consent to monitoring for these purposes.

Any account found connecting to a third  party network or system without authorization from the third party is  subject to suspension. Access to networks or systems outside of your  direct control must be with expressed written consent from the third  party. First Host may, at its discretion, request and require  documentation to prove access to a third party network or system is  authorized.

We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Any material that, in our judgment, is obscene, threatening,  illegal, or violates our terms of service in any manner may be removed  from our servers (or otherwise disabled), with or without notice.

Failure to respond to email from our  abuse department within 48 hours may result in the suspension or  termination of your services. All abuse issues must be dealt with via email and will have a response within 48 hours.

Potential harm to minors is strictly  forbidden, including but not limited to child pornography or content  perceived to be child pornography (Lolita). Any site found to host child pornography or linking to child pornography will be suspended  immediately without notice. Your services will be terminated with or  without notice. Violations will be reported to the appropriate law  enforcement agency.

It is your responsibility to ensure that  scripts/programs installed under your account are secure and permissions of directories are set properly, regardless of installation method.  When at all possible, set permissions on most directories to 755 or as  restrictive as possible. Users are ultimately responsible for all  actions taken under their account. This includes the compromise of  credentials such as user name and password. It is required that you use a secure password. If a weak password is used, your account may be  suspended until you agree to use a more secure password. Audits may be  done to prevent weak passwords from being used. If an audit is  performed, and your password is found to be weak, we will notify you and allow time for you to change/update your password.

3.) Zero Tolerance Spam Policy
We take a zero tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited e-mail, bulk  emailing, and spam. "Safe lists" and purchased lists will be treated as  spam. Any user who sends out spam will have their account terminated  with or without notice.

There is an outgoing email hourly limit  per domain. This limit is also applied towards Mailman. If you send over this amount in any  hour, most of the e-mails will bounce back with an  undeliverable error. If this occurs, it will then take some time for  your account to be able to send again so we recommend waiting at least 1 hour after this issue  occurs to begin sending email again.

Our servers have a limit of 30 POP3/IMAP  checks per hour per each user's connecting IP address. If you go over  this you're likely to  get a wrong password error message or an error  stating "login incorrect". If this occurs, please wait an hour and it  will automatically unblock you. To prevent this from happening again,  please make sure to disable auto checking or at least set it to  something higher such as once every 10 minutes.

Mailing Lists Rules
Mailing lists may not exceed 3,000 addresses. Note: Dividing one large list   into smaller lists to get below this limit is not allowed.

There is also a limit to the number of Mailman mailing lists permitted on each account, see hosting plan details for more information. (NOTE: This does not apply to other mailing list programs such as PHPList. This only applies to Mailman.)

1. Any time you're sending a  message no matter how large your e-mail list is you must throttle it. We recommend you throttle it to at the very least sending 1 email every 15 seconds. If the mailing list software you're using does not allow you  to throttle you must switch to an application or script that will. We  recommend PHPList, which can be found in your CPanel under Fantastico.

IMPORTANT: If you do not throttle and you try sending 500 emails, the server will try sending all 500 in 1 second which is not possible on our shared servers. This will cause a very  high load on the server and the entire server will be sluggish,  potentially affecting your sites and service, until this sending process is completed. It is our job to keep the server up and running without  being sluggish or experiencing issues. Anyone who causes the server's  load to go high will be suspended and the process will be terminated. If you choose not to throttle, you will most likely be suspended for  crashing the server.

2. Any  mailing list over 900 email addresses is only allowed to be sent to  during off-peak times to prevent high server loads. Off peak times  qualify as all day Saturday and Sunday, and 8AM to 3PM South Africa  Standard Time, Monday through Friday.

3. The  list must be a Double Opt-In list. This means a user has subscribed for a newsletter or other email marketing messages by explicitly requesting  it and confirming the email address to be their own. Confirmation is  usually done by responding to a notification/confirmation email sent to  the email address the end user specified. The double opt-in method  eliminates the chance of abuse where somebody submits someone else's  email address without their knowledge and against their will. You will  not be permitted to mail any mailing list that you were given or  purchased. In doing so, this will also be considered spamming and may  result in termination of the offending account.

4. Any  unsolicited e-mail being sent will result in suspension or termination  of the offending account. We take a zero tolerance stance against  sending of unsolicited e-mail and other forms of spam.

5. No  direct SMTP mailers are allowed. An example of this would be a  Darkmailer or The Bat!. Any mail should be sent through the local mail  server/MTA for further delivery by the server and not done directly by  scripts.

Sites  advertised via SPAM (Spamvertised) may not be hosted on our servers.  This provision includes, but is not limited to SPAM sent via fax, phone, email, instant messaging, or usenet/newsgroups. No organization or  entity listed in the ROKSO may be hosted on our servers. Any account which results in our IP space being blacklisted will be immediately suspended and/or terminated.

First Host reserves the right to require  changes or disable as necessary any web site, account, database, or  other component that does not comply with its established policies, or  to make any such modifications in an emergency at its sole discretion.

First Host reserves the right to charge  the holder of the account used to send any unsolicited e-mail a clean up fee or any charges incurred for blacklist removal. This cost of the  clean up fee is entirely at the discretion of First Host.

4) Payment Information
You agree to  supply appropriate payment for the services received from First Host, in advance of the time period during which such services are provided. You agree that until and unless you notify First Host of your desire to  cancel any or all services received, those services will be billed on a  recurring basis.

Cancellations must be done in writing.  Once we receive your cancellation and have confirmed all necessary  information with you via e-mail, we will inform you in writing  (typically email) that your account has been cancelled. An employee will confirm your request (and process your cancellation). If you do not  hear back from us within 24 hours after submitting your cancellation,  please contact us immediately via phone.

Account renewals are billed 30 days  before the renew date. As a client of First Host, it is your  responsibility to ensure that your payment information is up to date,  and that all invoices are paid on time. You agree that until and unless  you notify First Host of your desire to cancel any or all services  received, those services will be billed on a recurring basis, unless  otherwise stated in writing by First Host. First Host provides a 10 day  grace period from the time the account is due for renewal and when it  must be paid. Any invoice that is outstanding for 10 days and not paid  will result in an account suspension until account balance has been paid in full. Service suspended for non-payment is subject to a R25.00  reconnect charge.

Invoices that have been paid more than once can only be added as credit towards the account and will not be refunded.

First Host reserves the right to change the payment amount and any other charges at anytime.

5) Backups and Data Loss
Your use of  this service is at your sole risk. First Host is not responsible for  files and/or data residing on your account. You agree to take full  responsibility for files and data transferred and to maintain all  appropriate backup of files and data stored on First Host servers.

6) Cancellations
First Host reserves  the right to cancel, suspend, or otherwise restrict access to the  account at any time with or without notice.

Any abuse of our staff in any medium or format will result in the suspension or termination of your services.

6A) Resource Usage

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.
  10. When using PHP include functions for including a local file, include the local file rather than the URL.  Instead of include("http://yourdomain.co.za/include.php") use  include("include.php")
  11. To help reduce usage, do not force html to handle server-side code (like php and shtml).
  12. Only use https protocol when  necessary; encrypting and decrypting communications is noticeably more  CPU-intensive than unencrypted communications.

6B) INODES
The use of more than  200,000 inodes on any account may potentially result in a warning first, and if no action is taken future suspension. 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 or 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.

7) Bandwidth Usage
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.

8) Reselling accounts
Account holders may not resell (or make available for free) web hosting to other people

9) Indemnification
Customer agrees  that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold First Host harmless from  any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and claims, including  reasonable attorney's fees asserted against First Host, 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 First Host against liabilities  arising out of; (1) any injury to person or property caused by any  products sold or otherwise distributed in connection with First Host;  (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 customers from First Host's  server.

10) Disclaimer
First Host shall not be responsible for any damages your business may suffer. First Host makes no warranties of any kind, expressed or implied for services we provide. First Host  disclaims any warranty or merchantability or fitness for a particular  purpose. This includes loss of data resulting from delays, no  deliveries, wrong delivery, and any and all service interruptions caused by First Host and its employees.

11) Disclosure to law enforcement
First Host may disclose any subscriber information to law enforcement  agencies without further consent or notification to the subscriber upon  lawful request from such agencies. We will cooperate fully with law  enforcement agencies.

12) Changes to the TOS
First Host reserves the right to revise its policies at any time without notice.

Our goal is to provide affordable web hosting for small business owners and private individuals who would like to become noticed on the world wide web.

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ToS & AUP

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