Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) governs the use of Hostnali Webhost’s hosting services. It is the complete acceptable use agreement between Hostnali Webhost and the personal or corporate account holder, and it forms part of our Terms of Use. Breaching this AUP may result in the suspension or termination of your service. If there is a dispute between you and Hostnali Webhost about how this AUP should be interpreted, Hostnali Webhost’s interpretation, in its reasonable commercial judgment, applies.

Note: the resource limits in this policy (sections A and B below, and the Bandwidth, Email storage and Unlimited sections) do not apply to Virtual Private Servers (VPS) or dedicated servers. The content, email and network abuse rules apply to all services.

Hostnali Webhost provides web hosting, web design and script installation. We have legal and ethical responsibilities for the use of our servers and equipment, and our general policy is to act as a provider of internet presence. Hostnali Webhost may suspend or cancel a customer’s access to any or all of its services if we decide that the account has been used inappropriately.

What is appropriate usage?

Our shared hosting is designed for the web hosting needs of small, independently owned and operated businesses. It is not appropriate to use shared hosting for large enterprises or businesses with a sustained demand that places an undue burden on our systems or affects other customers. For those needs we recommend our VPS or dedicated servers.

Shared hosting means that many customers’ websites, email and storage are hosted on the same server. Hostnali Webhost uses abuse controls to make sure that one customer’s use does not affect the performance of our systems or other customers’ sites. It is not appropriate to use an account mainly as online storage or for archiving files.

General terms

If you use our services in line with our Terms of Use and this policy, your site can grow as large as your small business needs. To give everyone a good experience, however, we limit how fast an account can grow. The vast majority of our customers’ sites grow well within our rules, but our abuse controls may cause a brief delay while we check whether expansion is appropriate for your plan.

If you do any of the following, Hostnali Webhost may terminate your account without a refund. Depending on the situation, we may or may not send a warning first.

A. All hosting services

Host any unacceptable or inappropriate material, as determined by Hostnali Webhost at its sole discretion, including but not limited to: topsites; IRC scripts or bots; proxy scripts or anonymisers; pirated software or warez; image hosting scripts; autosurf, PTC, PTS or PPC sites; IP scanners; brute-force programs, scripts or applications; mail bombers or spam scripts; commercial banner-ad rotation services; file dump or mirror scripts; commercial audio streaming (more than one or two streams); escrow or bank debenture sites and bank debenture trading programs; high-yield investment programs (HYIP) or related sites; investment sites such as unlicensed forex or currency exchange, Ponzi, MLM or pyramid schemes; the sale of any controlled substance without prior proof of the required permits; prime bank programs; lottery sites; MUDs, RPGs or PPBGs; hateful, racist or harassment-oriented sites; hacker-focused sites, archives or programs; sites promoting illegal activities; forums or websites that distribute or link to warez, pirated or illegal content; and fraudulent sites.
Use more than 25% of system resources, including memory, CPU, disk, network and bandwidth capacity, for longer than 90 seconds in any consecutive 6-hour period.
Run long-running, stand-alone, unattended server-side processes, bots or daemons.
Run any type of web spider or indexer.
Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
Run, host or store any peer-to-peer (P2P) client, tracker, software, server, files, content or application, including BitTorrent.
Take part in any P2P or file-sharing network.
Use excessive resources that, at Hostnali Webhost’s sole discretion, damage or degrade the performance, usage or experience of our servers, other users or any Hostnali Webhost service.
Use the email service to send or receive unsolicited email.
Send email through automated scripts hosted on your website using your regular email account. For promotional emails and email campaigns, use a mailing list service rather than your mailbox. Mail of this kind sent through the regular mail system will be classified as spam even if the recipients opted in, and will lead to the immediate suspension of mail sending for the user or domain name. Repeated violations will lead to the permanent suspension of the domain name.
Send email to invalid recipient addresses. A user who generates too many bounce-backs from invalid recipients will be blocked. Repeated violations will lead to the permanent suspension of the domain name.
Send email from an invalid address that causes triple bounces. The sending user will be suspended, and repeated violations will lead to the permanent suspension of the domain name.
Send email with malicious content. This includes email sent from devices infected with a virus or malware, even without the user’s knowledge, and email that recipients may consider unsolicited.
Run cron jobs at intervals of less than 15 minutes.
Engage in any activity related to the purchase, sale or mining of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

B. Web and email hosting

You may not:

Use your account as a backup or storage device.
Run any game servers.
Store more than 100,000 files.
Constantly create and delete large numbers of files, or cause file system damage.
Run any MySQL query that takes longer than 15 seconds.
Divide a multi-domain hosting order into smaller packages for resale. A multi-domain hosting order may only be used by a single company or customer to host websites it fully owns. We may ask for documents, other than domain WHOIS details, that prove ownership of the company and of the domain names or websites. Having the same WHOIS details for every domain in the order is not enough to prove ownership.
Store a large number of media files (audio, video and similar). The limit is set at Hostnali Webhost’s sole discretion.
Send more than 100 emails per hour per user, or more than 300 emails per hour per domain name, or receive an unusually high volume of email for a user or domain name in any period.
Buy or use a dedicated IP address without installing an SSL certificate on it.
Use more than 50% of your hosting order’s disk space for storing email.
Use a WHMCS licence issued by Hostnali Webhost with any product or service other than the one it was issued for.
Store more than two website backup files.
Use a database larger than 2 GB.

Bandwidth

In most cases, if you use our services in line with our Terms of Use, visitors to your website can view and download as much content from your site as they like. In some circumstances, server processing power, server memory or our abuse controls may limit downloads from your site.

Each account has a monthly bandwidth allowance, which depends on the hosting package you buy, and you can use all of it. Bandwidth resets every month, and unused bandwidth cannot be carried over to the next month. If your account goes over its allowance, we may suspend the account until the start of the next month, until you buy more bandwidth or upgrade to a larger package, terminate the account, and/or charge an additional fee for the overage.

Email storage

If you use our services in line with our Terms of Use and this policy, you can use all of the disk space allocated to your account. Our abuse controls may limit how fast your mailboxes or folders grow, and there may be a short delay while we assess your usage. In some cases, splitting mail into additional folders or subfolders helps the system work well for everyone.

“Unlimited” features

Many of our plans include unlimited email accounts, subdomains, FTP accounts and, on some plans, domains. These are limited only by your account’s disk space: you can create as many as you like as long as you stay within your disk space limit.

Offensive content

You may not publish or transmit through Hostnali Webhost’s service any content that Hostnali Webhost reasonably believes:

is child sexual abuse material, or otherwise exploits children;
is pornography;
is excessively violent, incites or threatens violence, or contains harassment or hate speech;
is unfair or deceptive under the consumer protection laws of any jurisdiction, including chain letters and pyramid schemes;
is defamatory or violates a person’s privacy;
creates a risk to a person’s safety or health, or to public safety or health, compromises national security, or interferes with a law enforcement investigation;
improperly exposes trade secrets or other confidential or proprietary information of another person;
is intended to help others defeat technical copyright protections;
clearly infringes another person’s trademark, service mark, patent or other property right;
promotes illegal drugs, violates export control laws, or relates to illegal gambling or illegal arms trafficking;
is otherwise illegal, or solicits conduct that is illegal, under laws that apply to you or to Hostnali Webhost; or
is otherwise malicious or fraudulent, or may result in retaliation against Hostnali Webhost by offended viewers.

Hostnali Webhost also does not accept proxy, warez, escrow, high-yield investment program (HYIP), illegal gambling or lottery sites.

Content “published or transmitted” through Hostnali Webhost’s service includes web content, email, bulletin board posts, chat and any other posting or transmission that relies on an internet service provided by Hostnali Webhost.

Hostnali Webhost may terminate service for any of the reasons above, and any refund is at Hostnali Webhost’s sole discretion.

Security

You must take reasonable security precautions. Keep your passwords confidential and change them regularly.

Bulk commercial email

Bulk commercial email, mailing lists and email reflectors are allowed on Hostnali Webhost’s servers within the sending limits above. For any email sent from your Hostnali Webhost account:

your intended recipients must have given their consent to receive email through an affirmative means, such as an opt-in procedure;
your procedure for getting consent must include reasonable means of making sure that the person giving consent owns the email address;
you must not obscure the source of your email in any way; and
you must comply with section 69 of the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013, the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, 2002, the Consumer Protection Act, 2008 and all other applicable laws on electronic marketing.

These rules apply to messages sent using your Hostnali Webhost service, and to messages sent from any network by you or anyone on your behalf that directly or indirectly refer the recipient to a site hosted on your Hostnali Webhost service. You may not use a third-party email service that does not apply similar rules to all of its customers.

Unsolicited email

You may not send unsolicited email, in bulk or individually, to anyone who has said they do not wish to receive it. You must comply with the rules of any other network you access or take part in using Hostnali Webhost’s services.

Material protected by copyright

You may not publish, distribute or otherwise copy any music, software, art or other work protected by copyright unless:

the copyright owner has expressly authorised you to copy the work in that way; or
you are otherwise permitted to copy the work in that way under the Copyright Act, 1978 of South Africa or other applicable copyright law.

Hostnali Webhost will terminate the service of repeat copyright infringers.

Domain registration details

You must keep valid, current contact information on file with your domain name registrar for every domain hosted on the Hostnali Webhost network.

Disclaimer

Hostnali Webhost has no duty, and does not undertake by this AUP, to monitor or police its customers’ activities, and disclaims any responsibility for misuse of the Hostnali Webhost network.

Internet abuse

You may not engage in illegal, abusive or irresponsible behaviour, including:

unauthorised access to or use of data, systems or networks, including any attempt to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of a system or network, or to breach security or authentication measures (including those of Hostnali Webhost and its customers), without the express authorisation of the owner of the system or network;
monitoring data or traffic on any network or system without the authorisation of its owner;
interfering with service to any user, host or network, including mail bombing, flooding, deliberate attempts to overload a system, and broadcast attacks;
using an internet account or computer without the owner’s authorisation, including phishing (tricking people into revealing their passwords), password theft, security hole scanning and port scanning;
forging any TCP/IP packet header or any part of the header information in an email or newsgroup posting;
any conduct that is likely to result in retaliation against the Hostnali Webhost network; or
using Hostnali Webhost’s network in a way that unreasonably interferes with other customers’ use of the network.

Newsgroups, chat forums and other networks

You must follow the rules and conventions of any bulletin board, chat group or other forum you take part in, including their rules on content and commercial posts. These groups usually prohibit off-topic commercial messages and mass posting to multiple forums.