Terms and Conditions
You must agree to the following terms and conditions to have your web site hosted by Ponder Consulting. By placing your order you indicate acceptance of these terms.
General Terms
Allowed content
Ponder Consulting does not allow storage and/or display of the following material on its servers. This includes uploading to web sites, or transmitting by any material (by e-mail, uploading, posting or otherwise).
- Adult Sites: We prohibit any adult (pornographic) web-sites on our servers, including pedophile sites, sites linking to pornographic sites (outside links) and pornographic advertisements on your own site.
- Illegal use: Ponder Consulting services may not be used for illegal purposes, or in support of illegal activities.
- Copyright or trademark infringement: Use of the Ponder Consulting service to transmit any material (by e-mail, uploading, posting, hot linking, directly linking or otherwise) that infringes any copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret or other proprietary rights of any third party, including, but not limited to, the unauthorized copying of copyrighted material, the digitization and distribution of photographs from magazines, books, or other copyrighted sources, and the unauthorized transmittal of copyrighted software.
- Distribution of Viruses, Spyware, and Malware: Distributions of software that attempts to and/or causes damage, harassment, or annoyance to persons, data, and/or computer systems are prohibited. Distribution of software that monitors computer or computer user activity without the computer user\’s knowledge and consent is prohibited.
Spamming
Spamming (sending unsolicited commercial or bulk emails) using our servers is strictly not allowed. DO NOT SEND SPAM EMAIL FROM OUR SERVERS.
Sending spam emails which include links to a web site hosted on one of our servers is also forbidden. We reserve the right to suspend or terminate any site that is linked to from spam emails.
To protect our servers we may impose limits on the number of emails sent within a particular time frame from our servers.
Usenet Spamming: We have a zero tolerance policy for the use of our network for the posting of messages or commercial advertisements, which violate the rules, regulations, FAQ or charter of any newsgroups or mailing list. Commercial messages that are appropriate under the rules of a newsgroup or mailing list or that are solicited by the recipients are permitted.
Server Use
We want to allow our customers to use our servers the best way, but in order to protect other users, we may, temporarily or not, suspend a shared hosting site if this site slows down our servers or uses too much server resource. In this case, we will try to find a solution together with the customer.
You may not use your site to publish material, which Ponder Consulting determines, at its sole discretion, to be unlawful, indecent or objectionable. For purposes of this policy, “material” refers to all forms of communications including narrative descriptions, graphics (including photographs, illustrations, images, drawings, logos), executable programs, video recordings, and audio recordings.
You must take reasonable steps to protect the security of our servers. This includes, but is not limited to:
- keeping all passwords to Ponder Consulting systems secure. You must not reveal your passwords to third parties.
- ensuring that any scripts that are installed on your site cannot be exploited to compromise the security or the server.
The following constitute violations of Ponder Consulting terms and conditions:
- Illegal use: Ponder Consulting services may not be used for illegal purposes, or in support of illegal activities. Ponder Consulting reserves the right to cooperate with legal authorities and/or injured third parties in the investigation of any suspected crime or civil wrongdoing.
- Harm to minors: Use of the Ponder Consulting service to harm, or attempt to harm, minors in any way, including, but not limited to child pornography.
- Threats: Use of the Ponder Consulting service to transmit any material (by e-mail, uploading, posting or otherwise) that threatens or encourages bodily harm or destruction of property.
- Harassment: Use of the Ponder Consulting service to transmit any material (by e-mail, uploading, posting or otherwise) that harasses another.
- Fraudulent activity: Use of the Ponder Consulting service to make fraudulent offers to sell or buy products, items, or services, or to advance any type of financial scam such as “pyramid schemes,” “ponzi schemes,” “hyip schemes,” and “chain letters.”
- Forgery or impersonation: Adding, removing or modifying identifying network header information in an effort to deceive or mislead is prohibited. Attempting to impersonate any person by using forged headers or other identifying information is prohibited.
- Unsolicited commercial e-mail / Unsolicited bulk e-mail (SPAM): Use of the Ponder Consulting service to transmit any unsolicited commercial or unsolicited bulk e-mail is expressly prohibited. Violations of this type will result in the immediate termination of the offending Ponder Consulting account.
- Unauthorized access: Use of the Ponder Consulting service to access, or to attempt to access, the accounts of others, or to penetrate, or attempt to penetrate, security measures of Ponder Consulting’s or another entity’s computer software or hardware, electronic communications system, or telecommunications system, whether or not the intrusion results in the corruption or loss of data, is expressly prohibited and the offending account is subject to immediate termination.
- Fraudulent links: Use of fraudulent referrers to a site hosted on our servers is forbidden. This includes, but is not limited to, blog ping backs. Inappropriate (e.g. off-topic or automated) postings to forums, or other services containing links to a site hosted on our servers is forbidden.
- Servers and Proxies: Use of server software or scripts which creates a listening socket on our server is forbidden. Proxies which receive requests over HTTP and use our network connection to forward the request to another server are not permitted. This includes, but is not limited to, HTTP proxies.
- File Sharing and Bit Torrents: Use of software and scripts for “file sharing”, “bit torrents” or similar is not allowed on our servers. This includes sending or receiving files using these mechanisms.
- Removing or Altering Ponder Consulting Admin Access: Ponder Consulting holds an admin login on each software application housed on our servers. In the instance a client revokes, or alters in any way, Ponder Consulting admin login credentials, client will be found in violation.
Accounts found in violation of the terms and conditions will result in immediate account suspension of hosting, no refunds will be granted.
Scripts
You are responsible for ensuring that any scripts that you install do not compromise the security of our servers. This includes, but is not limited to:
- ensuring that it is not possible to abuse such scripts to gain access to the file system of the server.
- ensuring that it is not possible to abuse such scripts to send emails to third parties.
- ensuring that you update any installed scripts with the latest releases, which often contain security fixes.
If a script installed on your site is compromised, we may require a clean up of your site.
Where we provide an automatic script installer we may update installed scripts to the latest releases.
Server maintenance
We might have, from time to time, to perform maintenance, upgrades or replacements to our servers. We reserve the right to suspend access to such server during the required time to do the maintenance, upgrade or exchange the server, for no more than 4 hours. In this event, the users will be sent an e- mail at least 24 hours before the due date and time for maintenance.
Responsibility
Ponder Consulting will not be responsible for any damages your business may suffer. Ponder Consulting makes no warranties of any kind, expressed or implied for services we provide. Ponder Consulting disclaims any warranty or merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This includes loss of data resulting from delays, non-deliveries, wrong delivery, and any and all service interruptions caused by Ponder Consulting, its employees, suppliers, customers or any third party.
You, as a Ponder Consulting customer, are solely responsible for the content stored on and served by your web site.
Backups
You are solely responsible for maintaining adequate backups of your content.
We may provide a backup service for your site, however, we do not accept responsibility for any failure of our backup mechanism. We will restore your site from backup without charge once each calendar month. If further restorations are necessary, we may charge a $65 fee for doing so.
Technical Support
Ponder Consulting provides technical support to our customers through email or phone during business hours 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. EST. For shared hosting, Ponder Consulting provides support related to your website’s physical functioning. Ponder Consulting does not offer technical support for application specific issues such as PHP or cgi programming, html, script installation, email clients or any other such issue.
You may purchase additional technical support for issues which are not covered by our normal support. Our standard technical support rate is $65 USD per hour, to be billed after services are rendered. For a cost estimate, please contact us.
Modification
We may modify any of these terms and conditions contained, at any time and in our sole discretion, by posting a change notice or a new agreement on our site. Your continued participation now, or within thirty (30) days following the posting notice of any changes in these terms and conditions, will constitute a binding acceptance by you of such rules, changes or modifications. If any modification is unacceptable to you, your only recourse is to terminate your account(s), however no refunds will be granted.
Uptime Guarantee
We have an availability guarantee of 99.99% availability per month. If this is not met, we will, on request, credit your hosting with 1 day for each hour your site is down, up to a maximum credit of 30 days in any calendar month. The Uptime Guarantee is not applicable to domain name registrations.
Chargeback and Payment Disputes
All payment disputes must be raised via the contact form.
If you dispute a payment through your credit card company, through PayPal or another financial institution we may immediately suspend or terminate all services you have purchased from us. We may levy a charge of $65 per dispute instance, payable before we restore your services. If we are charged a chargeback settlement fee, or other fee related to the payment dispute, we may pass this fee onto you.
Termination and Suspension
You may terminate your hosting at any time by advising us via a support ticket that you wish to do so.
We may suspend any or all of your services where we have reason to suspect a violation of our terms and conditions whilst we investigate the suspected violation. We may suspend your services where we have reason to suspect that a script installed on your site is being abused whilst we investigate the suspected abuse.
Suspension Due to Non-Payment Policy
Any company who has not paid their full, invoiced annual fee amount at the time it is due will be suspended. From the date of suspension, the company can no longer access any part of their website, until the hosting is paid in full. We do not accept partial payments. Upon full payment, the hosting account will be reinstated.
Clean Up
If we suspect that activities performed by you or a third party on your hosting account, whether deliberate or not, may compromise the security of our server or any other server or computer, we may require a clean up to be performed.
A simple clean up will be provided free of charge, resulting in total loss of existing data on your hosting account. You should then restore the site from your backups. Depending on the severity, we may agree to perform a complex clean up (targeting only compromised files), for which we will charge support at our standard support rate.
Website Security
Ponder Consulting utilizes advanced, industry standard, tools and protocols to keep our servers secure and to mitigate potential threats. These tools cannot secure against all possible threats however. Because of this, it is the customer’s sole and exclusive responsibility to determine if the security measures Ponder Consulting employs are appropriate for their needs. In particular, customers must ensure that scripts, applications, or programs used in conjunction with their website/account are secure and up-to-date.
This includes, but is not limited to, updating scripts, applications, or programs to the latest secure version available; maintaining and updating of passwords or other login credentials on an ongoing basis to ensure the security of their site and the security of other users on the server. Any scripts, applications, or programs available via the control panel interface are solely the customer’s responsibility to update and secure.
Ponder Consulting will not be liable for loss or damages of any kind, under any legal theory, caused by the customers failure to comply with the foregoing security obligations or caused by any person to whom the customer grants access to the services we provide.
Customers agree to notify Ponder Consulting no later than thirty minutes of their discovery of any unauthorized uses of their services or any other breaches of security, and to cooperate fully, at Customer’s expense, with any investigation and mitigation activities Ponder Consulting deems necessary.
Violations
If you violate our terms and conditions, we may terminate or suspend (temporarily or indefinitely) any services you have with us. In this case no refund will be given for any payments that have been, or are made by you to us.
Following a violations of or terms and conditions, we may levy an investigation charge of $65 per instance.
Cancellation and refund
Ponder Consulting will accept a request to cancel a web hosting account and give a full refund to a new customer who requests such refund and cancellation within 30 days of ordering. We will also accept a request to cancel a web hosting account at any time, however, no refunds can be granted. Hosting fees are due in advance on an annual billing cycle. No exceptions. Domain name registrations cannot be cancelled and are not refundable.
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