Web Hosting Policy

Fees
Backups
Email
Unacceptable Activities
Policy for those who maintain their own sites

Hosting Fees:

1. Invoices are sent electronically the third week of the month for the next month's hosting. Payments are due by the 5th of each month. Yearly payments are accepted at the normal monthly rate.

2. Payments may be made electronically from the invoice or by PayPal, check or money order. Credit card payments may also be made by calling our office during normal business hours.

3. Payment not received by the 5th of the month will result in the site being disabled (visitors will not be able to access the site). A fee of $25 will be assessed in order to make the site accessible. 

4. Payment not received by the 15th day of the month will result in the site being removed from the server. A fee of $50 will be assessed in order to reinstate the site.

5. Hosting may be cancelled by calling our office during normal business hours or in writing either by email or postal mail. Notice of cancellation MUST be made 30 days prior to the cancellation date. Hosting services are provided month-to-month. Monthly hosting fees will not be refunded. Yearly hosting fees will be refunded on a pro-rated basis upon request, a small fee - equal to one months hosting will be assessed.

BACKUPS:

We maintain daily backups of all of the sites we maintain. It is the clients’ responsibility to maintain local copies of their web content if they are maintaining their own sites or have someone other than ME Solutions maintaining their site. If loss of data occurs due to an error on our part, we will attempt to recover the data at no charge to the client. If data loss occurs due to negligence of the client in securing their account or by an action of the client or third party representing the client, fees will be charged at the normal hourly rate to restore the data.

Email:

1. Hosting clients have 500 email accounts (yourname@yourbusiness.com) available. This requires setting up a new account in your email program in order to send and receive email using these addresses. We will help you set up the new email account on your end and make sure it is working properly. More than 10 email address will be assessed additional charges to set up.

2. Email is the most problematic issue we encounter. A problem can arise from different sources other than hosting services. It has been our experience that many email problems originate on the client's own computer or with their ISP. Although we are happy to help resolve these types of issues, if the problem did not originate from our servers, we need to charge our normal consultation fee for our time.

UNACCEPTABLE ACTIVITIES:

Email Practices:

• Spamming (sending unsolicited advertising to those with which the customer has no existing business relationship, posting off-topic advertising in newsgroups, etc.); 
• Spoofing (using a return email address which is not the valid reply address of the sender or sending an email message which does not contain enough information to enable the recipient to identify the party who is really sending the message;
• Passive spamming (promoting a web site hosted by our services by spamming from some other source)
• Trolling (posting controversial messages in newsgroups to generate responses)
• Mailbombing (inundating a user with email without any serious intent to correspond)
• Generating a higher volume of outgoing mail than a normal user (20% or more of available system resources)
• Subscribing someone else to an electronic mailing list without that person's permission.

Note: A message is considered unsolicited if it is posted in violation of a newsgroup charter or sent to a recipient who has not requested the message. Making an email address available to the public does not constitute a request to receive messages. Distribution of mass emailing programs is also prohibited. All recipients on a mailing list must have personally subscribed. Mailing lists may not be used to distribute unsolicited email. If you are not sure if your actions will be in violation, please ask first. We also do not allow sites selling spamware.

Abuse of the legal rights of others:

Examples of unacceptable activities in this regard include:

• posting private information about a person without their consent
• Infringing intellectual property rights
• Defaming a person or business
• Knowingly making available code which will have a deleterious effect on third party computers.

Abuse of the law:

Our services may be used for lawful purposes only. Illegality includes but is not limited to:

• Drug dealing
• Attempting without authorization to access a computer system (hacking)
• Pirating (distributing copyrighted material in violation of copyright law, specifically MP3s, MPEG's, ROMs, and ROM emulators)
• Gambling
• Schemes to defraud
• Trafficking in obscene material
• Sending a message or having content that is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another person
• Threatening bodily harm or damage to individuals or groups
• Violating U.S. export restrictions
• Stalking
• Violating other state or federal law such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or the Economic Espionage Act.
• Linking to illegal material is also prohibited.

Pornography:

Pornography and sex-related merchandising, or links to such material, even if legal, is not an acceptable use of our services

Hacking/Cracking:

We reserve the right to report illegal activities to any and all regulatory, administrative, and/or governmental authorities for prosecution.

OTHER BEHAVIOR:

The following examples of unacceptable behavior are non-exclusive, and are provided for guidance purposes. If you are unsure if your actions will be a violation of our policies please ask.

• Server broadcast messages or any message sent on an intrusive basis to any directly or indirectly attached network.
• Attempt to circumvent any user authentication or security of host, network, or account. 
• Accessing data not intended for user. 
• Probing the security of any network. 
• Spawning dozens of processes. 
• Port scans, ping floods, packet spoofing, forging router information, Denial of Service attacks, sniffers, flooding, spoofing, ping bombing, smurfs, winnuke, land, teardrop.
• Promulgation of viruses. 
• IRC bots such as eggdrop or BitchX. 

Any activity, whether or not the intrusion results in the corruption or loss of data, will be investigated and proper action taken. The presence of any of these programs, whether or not run, will result in action against the user including suspension or termination.

The following policies apply to those customers who wish to maintain their own web site:

Many of our customers wish to maintain their own web sites. We appreciate this desire (after all, that is how I got involved in designing web sites). While this may be practical for some, it can be disastrous for others, particularly those who do not have sufficient knowledge of html and other coding. We encourage our customers who wish to maintain their own sites, but do NOT guarantee it will be a pleasant experience.

1. The customer is responsible for keeping a current backup file of the site. Although the site is backed up on the server regularly, it is always a good policy to keep a current local backup. 

2. You will be provided with your own login information to access the web site.

3. We will assist with changing domain name servers (DNS) to our servers.

4. Consultation services to assist you with making changes to your web site or uploading files is available at our standard hourly consultation fee. We do not support all FTP or HTML editing software as well as various operating systems. You will not be charged if we are unable to solve the problem.

5. You may contact us by phone or email if you should experience any problems. We will do our best to diagnose the situation and resolve issues. Quite frequently a problem may lie elsewhere. We will attempt to offer suggestions if this is the situation.

6. Additional promotional services are available to you at our standard rates.

7. We will do our best to work with third parties, when necessary, but reserve the right to charge our normal Consultation fees if the situation becomes overly time-consuming or non-productive.

8. You are responsible for securing your username/password.

9. Webmastering your own site requires a certain level of knowledge in the use of Internet languages, protocols, and software. This level of knowledge varies depending on the anticipated use and desired content of your web site. The following examples are offered:

• Web Publishing: requires knowledge of HTML, properly locating and linking documents, FTPing Web contents, Graphics, text, sound, image mapping, etc.
• FrontPage web publishing: knowledge of the FrontPage tools as well as Telnet and FTP understanding and capability.
• CGI-Scripts: requires a knowledge of the UNIX environment, TAR & GUNZIP commands, Perl, CShell scripts, permissions, etc.
• Mail: a use of mail clients to receive and send mail, etc. 

You acknowledge that you have the necessary knowledge to create and maintain your own web site. You also acknowledge that it is not our responsibility to provide this knowledge or support free of charge.

10. The client is responsible for all activity originating from the account unless proven to be a victim of outside hacking or address forgery.