Terms of Service
Ownership
The owner of the payment method (credit card, Google checkout, PayPal) which is utilized for payment on the account is designated as the authorized owner of the account.
Third Party Providers
All transactions with third party providers are solely between the visitor and the individual provider. Hostwinds is not the agent, representative, trustee or fiduciary of you or the third party provider in any transaction.
All discounts, promotions and special third party offers may be subject to additional restrictions and limitations by the third party provider. All transactions with third party providers are subject to the terms and conditions under which the provider agrees with you to provide the goods or services. You should confirm the terms of any purchase and/or use of goods or services with the specific provider with whom you are dealing.
We do not make any representations or warranties regarding, and are not liable for, the quality, availability, or timeliness of goods or services provided by a third party provider. You undertake all transactions with these providers at your own risk. We do not warrant the accuracy or completeness of any information regarding third party providers.
Content
All services provided by Hostwinds may only be used for lawful purposes, The laws of the United States of America apply to all clients of Hostwinds.com The customer agrees to indemnify and hold harmless Hostwinds 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 another’s 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 email abuse@Hostwinds.com with the information pertaining to your claim.
Using a shared 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 Shared and Reseller servers include: IRC Scripts/Bots
Proxy Scripts/Anonymizers
Pirated Software/Warez
Image Hosting Scripts (similar to Photobucket or Tinypic)
IP Scanners
Bruteforce Programs/Scripts/Applications
Mail Bombers/Spam Scripts
File Dump/Mirror Scripts (similar to Rapidshare)
Sale of any controlled substance without prior proof of appropriate permit(s)
Lottery/Gambling Sites
Sites promoting illegal activities
Forums and/or websites that distribute or link to Warez/pirated/illegal content
Fraudulent Sites (Including, but not limited to sites listed at aa419.org & escrow-fraud.com)
We would also like to make it clear that all of the files on our shared hosting accounts need to pertain to your website(s), Hostwinds shared hosting may not be used for massive file storage systems, or backup storage solutions.. Clients are also not authorized to use Hostwinds for the hosting of download mirrors, you may have files for your clients/users/ to use, however if your website is based around users downloading files, you will need to look into a VPS solution
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.
Zero Tolerance Spam Policy
We take a zero tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited e-mail, bulk emailing, and spam. "Safe lists", purchased lists, and selling of lists will be treated as spam. Any user who sends out spam will have their account terminated with or without notice. We also reserve the right to charge clients dedicated to spam mailing a fee of up to $250 per hour in consulting fees for any remedial actions that Hostwinds elects to take in the event that, as a result of Customer's activities, Hostwinds servers or IP space are placed in any third-party mail filtering software or black hole lists.
Backups and Data Loss
Your use of this service is at your sole risk. Our backups run constantly mirroring all of your data on to a second disk to protect against hardware failure. We also backup all Shared, Business, Reseller, VPS, and Cloud hosting client’s files to offsite backup servers every night. Hostwinds 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 Hostwinds servers.
60 Day Money-Back Guarantee
Hostwinds offers a 60 day money-back guarantee to any Customer who signs up for shared or business web hosting. This gives Customer a chance to test out Host wind’s services to see if they're right for Customer. If Customer is not happy with host wind’s services in a 60 day period, Customer will receive a refund, if the client is in their second month, they are only entitled to receive a refund for that month. The VPS plans are also eligible for a 60 day money back guarantee; however the cPanel setup fee of $13 is nonrefundable, as is the cPanel license fee. If you have already taken advantage of our money back guarantee once, and decide to return to Hostwinds later, you will not be eligible for another refund. In
Note: 60 day money-back guarantee does not apply for Domains, Software Licenses, SSL's, Services Performed, IP Addresses, Product Upgrades, Cloud Servers, or for Dedicated Servers.
Unlimited Hosting Policy
Hostwinds allocates Customers an unlimited amount of disk space and bandwidth. The unlimited disk space and bandwidth may only be used to store and transfer files relevant to the website(s) being hosted. If a client causes continuous server or service interruptions under their current plan, then they will be asked to upgrade to a more powerful plan (Business, VPS, or Dedicated). In these extreme cases the client will be notified of a need to upgrade. We will NEVER terminate a client’s account, and we will only suspend accounts in the most extreme circumstances (That is it is causing the server to crash), or if the client has not contacted us after we send out warning emails of the abuse.
Shared Hosting Users may not:
1) Use 10% or more of system resource over a 24 hour period average (IE If your website accounts for 10% of the load on the entire server, then you will be asked to upgrade). 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 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.
5) Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities
6) Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc.
VPS Usage
Clients are not allowed to use more than their burstable RAM, if a client repeatedly overloads their VPS's burstable RAM then that client will be required to upgrade to the next level up of a VPS. Using more than your burstable RAM will cause your VPS to crash, because of Hostwinds advanced monitoring systems, we will reboot your VPS for you to minimize downtime, but repeat offenders will need to upgrade to a higher level. In addition clients using their Burstable RAM more than 80% of the time will also be required to upgrade to a higher level VPS, to help keep VPS usage fair among clients.
VPS accounts may also not exceed a 15 minute load average greater than two (2) times the amount of CPU cores given.
Abuse Towards Hostwinds
At Hostwinds, Customers are treated with respect and in return Hostwinds expects to be treated well with respect. If Hostwinds feels as if Customer is being disrespectful or demeaning to any staff members. The customer may be asked to move to a new hosting provider, Customer will be given one week (7 days) to move to a new host. After this time period, Hostwinds reserves the right to completely remove/terminate Customer's account. Customer will not be entitled to any refunds. However, refunds may be issued for advanced payments.
Promotion Code Abuse
Any user caught signing up with multiple accounts to take advantage of our promotion code offers will have their accounts merged, suspended, and billed for the full amount that would be due had the customer not created multiple accounts to take advantage of offers more than once. The accounts will not be unsuspended until the amount is paid in full.
Affiliate Abuse
Any user caught posting their coupon codes generated for affiliate payouts on public coupon code websites, such as retailmenot, will be promptly dropped from our affiliate program. The appropriate use of our affiliate code system is to either post the codes on your website which you own that promotes hosting. Anyone found to be using the Hostwinds brand name in promoting their affiliate offers (Example: Targeting Traffic For the Keyword "Hostwinds Coupon Codes"), will have those affiliates removed from their account. The purpose of our affiliate program is to gain new clients we would have otherwise not had access to, attempting to profit off of clients who are already looking for Hostwinds, is not how the program was designed.
Server Abuse/Customer Abuse
Any attempted attack against any Hostwinds server and/or Customer being hosted by Hostwinds will result in automatic termination of the offending account with no refund including, but not limited to, no refunds for advanced payments, and a permanent banning of the offending Customer.
Violation of Hostwinds Agreement
Failure to fully comply with Hostwinds Agreement may result in an immediate suspension and/or terminated without any refund. There will be no refunds for advanced payments. Whilst being hosted by Hostwinds, Customer must adhere to Agreement. If Customer is not sure about anything, please contact Hostwinds via Hostwinds customer support portal (client area) for clarification.
Hostwinds reserves the right to remove/suspend any account without notice of Agreement is violated. If Customer violates Hostwind's Agreement, Hostwinds will either give Customer warning or immediately terminate/delete Customer's account. No warning is required.
Price/Plan Changes
The amount Customer pays for hosting will never increase from the date of purchase. Hostwinds reserves the right to change prices listed on http://www.hostwinds.com.
Cancellations
All cancellations must be received through the client area before the next billing cycle begins, failure to cancel your account from the client area could result in your being auto billed, for which refunds will not be given.
Account Credits
All account credits are tied to the account on which they were originally added, in addition account credits cannot be refunded back to the client.
Chargebacks and Disputes
In the event that we are notified that a chargeback or other dispute is filed, all of your active services will be immediately terminated from our system, and your account will be immediately closed.
Reseller Web Hosting Agreement
This Agreement must be used for Customer's services as well. All content hosted on any Hostwinds server is subject to this Agreement.
Disclaimer
Hostwinds shall not be responsible for any damages Customer's business may suffer. Hostwinds makes no warranties of any kind, expressed or implied for services provided. Hostwinds 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 Hostwinds and its Customers.
Disclosure to law enforcement
Hostwinds may disclose any subscriber information to law enforcement agencies without further consent or notification to the subscriber upon lawful request from such agencies. Hostwinds will cooperate fully with law enforcement agencies.