You are here: Home-Terms of Our Services
The
use of services from
hcwebsites.com,hcwebsites.be,hcwebsites.eu
[hereafter referred to as "H&C
Websites"] constitutes agreement to
these terms. You may view our
Privacy Policy here.
1.) Account Setup / Email on file
We will setup your account after we
have received payment and we and/or
our payment partner(s) have screened
the order(s) in case of fraud. It is
your responsibility to provide us
with an email address which is not @
the domain(s) 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 H&C
Websites, it is your responsibility
to ensure that the contact
information for your domain account
and your actual domain name(s) is
correct and up-to-date. H&C Websites
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registration due to outdated contact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 our sales team via email.
Providing false contact information
of any kind may result in the
termination of your account. In
dedicated server purchases or high
risk transactions, it will be
necessary to provide government
issued identification and possibly a
scan of the credit card used for the
purchase. If you fail to meet these
requirements, the order may be
considered fraudulent in nature and
be denied.
Transfers
Our transfers team will make every
effort to help you move your site to
us. However, transfers are provided
as a courtesy service, and we can
not make guarantees regarding the
availability, possibility, or time
required to complete an account
transfer. Each hosting company is
configured differently, and some
hosting platforms save data in an
incompatible or proprietary format,
which may make it extremely
difficult if not impossible to
migrate some or all account data. We
will try our best, but in some cases
we may be unable to assist you in a
transfer of data from an old host.
The free transfer services are
available for 10 days from your sign
up date. Transfers outside of the 10
day free period will incur a charge;
please contact a member of the
transfers department with specific
details to receive a price quote.
2.) Content
All services provided by H&C
Websites may only be used for lawful
purposes. The laws of the Belgium
and the State of Namur apply.
The customer agrees to indemnify and
hold harmless H&C Websites 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 email
abuse@hcwebsites.com with the
information required. A list of
required information may be found
here. If the request is of a
licensing issue, we may require
further documentation.
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:
•Topsites
•IRC Scripts/Bots
•Proxy Scripts/Anonymizers
•Pirated Software/Warez
•Image Hosting Scripts (similar to
Photobucket or Tinypic)
•AutoSurf/PTC/PTS/PPC sites
•IP Scanners
•Bruteforce
Programs/Scripts/Applications
•Mail Bombers/Spam Scripts
•Banner-Ad services (commercial
banner ad rotation)
•File Dump/Mirror Scripts (similar
to rapidshare)
•Commercial Audio Streaming (more
than one or two streams)
•Escrow/Bank Debentures
•High-Yield Interest Programs (HYIP)
or Related Sites
•Investment Sites (FOREX, E-Gold
Exchange, Second Life/Linden
Exchange, Ponzi, MLM/Pyramid Scheme)
•Sale of any controlled substance
without prior proof of appropriate
permit(s)
•Prime Banks Programs
•Lottery Sites
•MUDs/RPGs/PBBGs
•Hateful/Racist/Harassment oriented
sites
•Hacker focused
sites/archives/programs
•Sites promoting illegal activities
•Forums and/or websites that
distribute or link to warez/pirated/illegal
content
•Bank Debentures/Bank Debenture
Trading Programs
•Fraudulent Sites (Including, but
not limited to sites listed at
aa419.org & escrow-fraud.com)
•Mailer Pro
Examples of unacceptable material on
all Dedicated servers include:
•IRCD (irc servers)
•IRC Scripts/Bots
•Pirated Software/Warez
•IP Scanners
•Bruteforce
Programs/Scripts/Applications
•Mail Bombers/spam Scripts
•Escrow
•High-Yield Interest Programs (HYIP)
or Related Sites
•Investment Sites (FOREX, E-Gold
Exchange, Second Life/Linden
Exchange, Ponzi, MLM/Pyramid Scheme)
•Sale of any controlled substance
without prior proof of appropriate
permit(s)
•Prime Banks Programs
•Lottery Sites
•Hateful/Racist/Harassment oriented
sites
•Hacker focused
sites/archives/programs
•Sites promoting illegal activities
•Forums and/or websites that
distribute or link to warez/pirated/illegal
content
•Bank Debentures/Bank Debenture
Trading Programs
•Fraudulent Sites (Including, but
not limited to sites listed at
aa419.org & escrow-fraud.com)
•Mailer Pro
H&C Websites services, including all
related equipment, networks and
network devices are provided only
for authorized customer use. H&C
Websites 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 H&C
Websites system(s) 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.H&C Websites
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
troubleticket/email and will have a
response within 48 hours.
If in doubt regarding the
acceptability of your site or
service, please contact us at
abuse@hcwebsites.com and we will be
happy to assist you.
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.
Resellers: we will suspend the site
in question and will notify you so
you may terminate the account. We
will further monitor your activity;
more than one infraction of this
type may result in the immediate
termination of your account.
Direct customers: 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.
Please read
http://www.hcwebsites.com/mailpolicy.html
for our generalized mail policy.
Please read
http://www.hcwebsites.com/dedicated-mailpolicy.html
for our dedicated server mail
policy.
Sites advertised via SPAM (Spamvertised)
may not be hosted on our servers.
This provision includes, but is not
limited to SPAM sent via fax, 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.
H&C websites 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.
H&C websites 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 H&C websites.
4.) Payment Information
You agree to supply appropriate
payment for the services received
from H&C websites, in advance of the
time period during which such
services are provided. You agree
that until and unless you notify H&C
websites of your desire to cancel
any or all services received, those
services will be billed on a
recurring basis. This includes when
accounts are suspended. When an
account’s invoices are paid outside
of the 10 day grace period, invoices
will not be automatically generated.
However, after the customer notifies
H&C websites of his or intent to
resume service, invoices will be
manually generated and payment
expected for the time the account
was suspended.
Cancellations must be done in
writing via the cancellation form
provided. 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 canceled. Your
cancellation confirmation will
contain a ticket/tracking number in
the subject for your reference, and
for verification purposes. You
should immediately receive an
automatic “Your request has been
received…” email with a tracking
number. An employee will confirm
your request (and process your
cancellation) shortly thereafter. If
you do not hear back from us, or do
not receive the automatic
confirmation email within a few
minutes after submitting your
cancellation, please contact us
immediately via phone. We require
that cancellations of service are
done through the online form to (a)
confirm your identity, (b) confirm
in writing you are prepared for all
files/emails to be removed, and (c)
document the request. This process
reduces the likelihood of mistakes,
fraudulent/malicious requests, and
ensures you are aware that the
files, emails, and account may be
removed immediately after a
cancellation request is processed.
As a client of H&C websites, 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 H&C websites of
your desire to cancel any or all
services received (by the proper
means listed in the appropiate
section of the Terms of Service),
those services will be billed on a
recurring basis, unless otherwise
stated in writing by H&C websites.
H&C websites reserves the right to
bill your credit card or billing
information on file with us. H&C
websites provides a 10 day grace
period from the time the invoice is
generated and when it must be paid.
Any invoice that is outstanding for
10 days and not paid will result in
a $10 late fee and/or an account
suspension until account balance has
been paid in full. The $10 late fee
is applied in addition to whatever
else is owed to H&C websites for
services rendered. Access to the
account will not be restored until
payment has been received.
It is the customer’s responsibility
to notify our sales team via email
at sales@H&C websites.com after
paying for a domain renewal and to
ensure the email is received and
acted upon. Domain renewal notices
and invoices are provided as a
courtesy reminder and H&C websites
cannot be held responsible for
failure to renew a domain or failure
to notify a customer about a
domain’s renewal.
Invoices that have been paid more
than once with multiple Paypal
Subscriptions can only be added as
credit towards the account and
cannot be refunded via Paypal. If
you require assistance with this
provision, please contact sales@H&C
websites.com
H&C websites reserves the right to
change the monthly payment amount
and any other charges at anytime.
5.) Backups and Data Loss
Your use of this service is at your
sole risk. Our backup service is
provided to you as a courtesy. H&C
websites 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 H&C websites servers.
Backups will not be provided for
accounts that have been suspended or
terminated for any reason unless
otherwise agreed to in writing by
H&C websites.
6.) Cancellations and Refunds
H&C websites 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.
Customers may cancel at any time via
a cancellation form. H&C websites
gives you an unconditional 10 day
money back guarantee on managed
shared hosting, and reseller
solutions for any customer who paid
the first invoice with a credit card
or with Paypal.
The following methods of payments
are non-refundable, and refunds will
be posted as credit to the hosting
account:
•Western Union Payments
•Checks
•Money orders
There are no refunds on dedicated
servers, administrative fees,
install fees for custom software, or
domain name purchases. Refund
requests for shared and reseller
accounts after the initial 45 days
will be refunded on a prorated basis
of any unused time.
Only first-time accounts are
eligible for a refund. For example,
if you’ve had an account with us
before, canceled and signed up
again, you will not be eligible for
a refund or if you have opened a
second account with us.
Violations of the Terms of Service
will waive the refund policy.
7. Resource Usage
User may not:
a) 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.
b) Run stand-alone, unattended
server-side processes at any point
in time on the server. This includes
any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
c) Run any type of web spider or
indexer (including Google Cash /
AdSpy) on shared servers.
d) Run any software that interfaces
with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
network.
e) 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.
f) Participate in any
file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities
g) Run any gaming servers such as
counter-strike, half-life,
battlefield1942, etc
h) Run cron entries with intervals
of less than 15 minutes.
i) When using PHP include functions
for including a local file, include
the local file rather than the URL.
Instead of
include(”http://yourdomain.com/include.php“)
use include(”include.php”)
7b.) INODES
The use of more than 250,000 inodes
on any shared account may
potentially result in a warning
first, and if no action is taken
future suspension. Accounts found to
be exceeding the 50,000 inode limit
will automatically be removed from
our backup system to avoid
over-usage. 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 of 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.
7c.) Backup Limit
Any shared account using more than
20 gigs of disk space will be
removed from our off site weekly
backup with the the exception of
Databases continuing to be backed
up. All data will continue to be
mirrored to a secondary drive which
helps protect against data loss in
the event of a drive failure.
8.) 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.
9a.) Money back Guarantee
On dedicated servers and collocation
no full refund will be honored — the
45 day money back guarantee does not
apply. We reserve the right to
refund a prorated amount or no
refund at all.
Each of H&C websites’s managed
shared and reseller servers carry a
10 day unconditional money back
guarantee on them. If you are not
completely satisfied with our
services within the first 45 days of
your service, you will be given a
full refund of the contract amount.
Remember, this is only for monthly
shared or reseller packages and does
not apply to dedicated servers,
administrative fees, install fees
for custom software, or domain name
purchases.
H&C websites will not activate new
orders or activate new packages for
customers who have an outstanding
balance with H&C websites. For a new
order to be setup or a new package
to be activated, you must have a
balance of $0.00, unless otherwise
stated by H&C websites in writing
9b.) Uptime Guarantee
If your shared / reseller server has
a physical downtime that is not
within the 99.9% uptime you may
receive one month of credit on your
account. Approval of the credit is
at the discretion of H&C websites
dependant upon justification
provided. Third party monitoring
service reports may not be used for
justification due to a variety of
factors including the monitor’s
network capacity/transit
availability. The uptime of the
server is defined as the reported
uptime from the operating system and
the Apache Web Server which may
differ from the uptime reported by
other individual services. To
request a credit, please contact
sales@H&C websites.com with
justification. All requests must be
made in writing via email. Uptime
guarantees only apply to shared /
reseller solutions. Dedicated
servers are covered by a network
guarantee in which the credit is
prorated for the amount of time the
server is down which is not related
to our uptime guarantee.
10.) Reseller: Client Responsibility
Resellers are responsible for
supporting their clients. H&C
websites does not provide support to
our Reseller’s Clients. If a
reseller’s client contacts us, we
reserve the right to place the
client account on hold until the
reseller can assume their
responsibility for their client. All
support requests must be made by the
reseller on their clients’ behalf
for security purposes. Resellers are
also responsible for all content
stored or transmitted under their
reseller account and the actions of
their clients’. H&C websites will
hold any reseller responsible for
any of their clients actions that
violate the law or the terms of
service.
11.) Shared (non-reseller accounts)
/ Semidedicated Servers
Shared accounts may not resell web
hosting to other people, if you wish
to resell hosting you must use a
reseller account. Semi-dedicated
servers are not backed up. You must
maintain your own backups.
12.) Dedicated Servers
H&C websites reserves the right to
reset the password on a dedicated
server if the password on file is
not current so that we may do
security audits as required by our
datacenter. It is the responsibility
of the client to ensure that there
is a valid email address and current
root password on file for their
dedicated server on file to prevent
downtime from forced password
resets. H&C websites reserves the
right to audit servers as needed and
to perform administrative actions at
the request of our datacenter.
Dedicated servers are NOT backed up
by us and it is the responsibility
of the client to maintain backups or
have a solution for this. You may
purchase an additional hard drive
and maintain backups to it as the
most simple solution. Please contact
sales@H&C websites.com if you wish
to obtain a secondary hard drive. It
is your responsibility to maintain
backups.
13.) Price Change
The amount you pay for hosting will
never increase from the date of
purchase. We reserve the right to
change prices listed on H&C
websites.com, and the right to
increase the amount of resources
given to plans at any time.
14.) Coupons
Discounts and coupon codes are
reserved for first-time accounts *or
first-time customers* only and may
not be used towards the purchase of
a domain registration unless
otherwise specified. If you have
signed up using a particular domain,
you may not resign up for that
domain using another coupon at a
later date. Any account found in
violation of these policies will be
reviewed by our sales department and
the appropriate invoices will be
added to the account. Coupon abuse
will not be tolerated and may result
in the suspension or termination of
the account.
15a.) Indemnification
Customer agrees that it shall
defend, indemnify, save and hold H&C
websites harmless from any and all
demands, liabilities, losses, costs
and claims, including reasonable
attorney’s fees asserted against H&C
websites, 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 H&C
websites against liabilities arising
out of; (1) any injury to person or
property caused by any products sold
or otherwise distributed in
connection with H&C websites; (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 H&C websites’s
server.
15b.) Arbitration By using any H&C
websites services, you agree to
submit to binding arbitration. If
any disputes or claims arise against
H&C websites or its subsidiaries,
such disputes will be handled by an
arbitrator of H&C websites’s choice.
An arbitrator from the American
Arbitration Association or the
National Arbitration Forum will be
selected in the state of Texas.
Arbitrators shall be attorneys or
retired judges and shall be selected
pursuant to the applicable rules.
All decisions rendered by the
arbitrator will be binding and
final. The arbitrator’s award is
final and binding on all parties.
The Federal Arbitration Act, and not
any state arbitration law, governs
all arbitration under this
Arbitration Clause. You are also
responsible for any and all costs
related to such arbitration.
16.) Disclaimer
H&C websites shall not be
responsible for any damages your
business may suffer. H&C websites
makes no warranties of any kind,
expressed or implied for services we
provide. H&C websites 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 H&C websites
and its employees.
17.) Disclosure to law enforcement
H&C websites 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.
18.) Changes to the TOS
H&C websites reserves the right to
revise its policies at any time
without notice.
