ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY

1. Abuse and spam

Spamming is forbidden. “Spamming” includes, without limitation, the transmission of unsolicited com­munications through the Eze-Hosting e-mail, instant messaging, SMS, chat rooms, discussion boards and similar facilities used for the purposes of communicating with other persons, creating false accounts for the purpose of sending Spam, sending unauthorized e-mail via open, third party servers, sending e-mails to users who requested to be removed from the mailing list and selling or exchanging the e-mail address of any person without that person’s consent. Eze-Hosting re­serves the right to suspend or terminate the services in accordance with its General Terms should you breach this policy.

As an Eze-Hosting customer, should you infringe this policy, you will be held liable for any costs incurred by Eze-Hosting, both monetary and in reputation. The use of any other service to make such a mailing or posting, with any reference to Eze-Hosting services (including but not limited to mailboxes, auto responders, and Web pages), shall also be grounds for account termination as described above. This is our first and most stringently enforced policy. Abusive behaviour can severely damage an online reputation and business. We will not tolerate such incidents of abuse.

2. Adult content

Our services are tuned for general purpose use. It is in the interest of efficiency and reliability to restrict these sites, in order to provide the best service for the majority of our customers.

Exceptions are made for educational sites.

Adult-oriented sites, designed for entertainment or commercial purposes, are not allowed on our servers. Forbidden sites include those that provide access to pornographic materials, whether for free or for payment, regardless of whether adult verification is used or not.

If Eze-Hosting in its sole and unfettered discretion determines that any customer content violates any law, including the Film and Publications Act, 65 of 1966 or this policy, it may:

• Request the customer to immediately remove such content; and/or
• Require the customer to amend or modify such content; and/or
• Without notice, terminate access to any services and/or suspend or terminate any services; and/ or
• Without notice, delete the offending content; and/or
• Notify the relevant authorities of the existence of such content (if required by law or other­wise), make any backup, archive or other copies of such material as may be required by such authorities, disclose such elements of the customer’s date as may be requested by the authori­ties and take such further steps as may be required by such authorities.

3. Interactive chat

Interactive Web applications, of the specific type commonly known as “chat”, are not allowed on Eze-Hosting servers, for the purposes of this policy, a “chat” system is defined as a Web site or portion thereof that encourages visitors to post messages in order to engage in “real-time” conversation with other visi­tors at the same site.

Eze-Hosting permits its users to host their own personal web logs (blogs) on the following basis:

• You accept and understand that any content that you provide to a blog enters an open, public  forum, and is not confidential;
• By disclosing personal information such as your name and email address in a blog, you acknowledge­ edge and understand that this information may be collected and used by other persons to com­municate with you;
• You may be held legally liable for the content that you provide in a blog;
• Eze-hosting does not generally monitor or moderate blogs run on servers it hosts and therefore does not have knowledge of the content on the blog’
• Eze-hosting does not condone, approve, endorse or support any content on the blog;
• You use the blog at your own risk and indemnify eze-hosting against any liability, loss or damage resulting there from.
• Eze-hosting reserves the right to remove any offending content or stop or suspend your use of a blog or hosting a forum.

4. Resource usage

Where the volume or resource usage negatively impacts on other clients in our hosting environ­ment – this may result in immediate suspension of hosting services. This may be due to excessive server hits, excessive bandwidth usage, inefficient scripts or database queries along with any other items for which system administrators deem a misuse of server resources.

• Users may not, through a cron job, CGI script, interactive command, or any other means, initiate the following on our servers:
• Run any process that requires more than 16Mb of memory space.
• Run any program that requires more than 30 CPU seconds.
• Use ‘Find’ anywhere except in their own directories.
• Have more than 32 open files.
• Run more than 8 simultaneous processes.
• Send out mail to more than 500 recipients (email addresses) within one hour. 500 recipients represent one of the following: 500 recipients for one email, 500 individual emails or a combina­tion of the two.
• Send or receive, through mail, any file larger than 10MB. This limit is enforced in our software.
• Accumulate more than 2000 mail messages in a single pop mailbox. If the message count is ex­ceeded, new messages will bounce to the original sender.
• Run their own mailing list software
• Run an interactive chat application.
• Run a banner exchange, remotely accessible web counter, or any other services that perform CGI processes for sites outside our network.

These limits are subject to change and variation as necessary, at the sole discretion of Eze-Hosting.

The restrictions on mail delivery exist for a very simple reason: We run Web servers, not mail serv­ers. Processing large amounts of mail adversely affects Web server performance.

If we find that you are performing bulk mail runs, regardless of whether it is Spam or not, we will have to deactivate your account and investigate. Please send such mailings through your local ISP’s mail server, or any other mail server which you are authorized to use. Many such mail servers are configured especially to handle an extremely high volume of mail.

CGI scripts are to be run only by users with the appropriate account. No user may run CGI scripts for the benefit of external sites or services. This includes in particular all variations of “free Web counter” services.

The use of system resource limits is intended to prevent runaway CGI scripts on an unattended server. Also, processes with large memory footprints or hungry CPU requirements will incur swap­ping and other slowdowns that cause problems for every site on the server.

Resource limits are enforced by automatic monitoring systems.

5. Database resource usage

MySQL and PostgreSQL databases are provided free-of-charge, subject to the conditions and re­strictions below.

• Each qualifying individual account is limited to the allocated quota.
• Each individual database is allotted up to 20 MB (megabytes) of disk space. Extra disk usage within  reason is allowed, and may be charged for at our normal disk over usage rate if deemed appropriate

6. Traffic usage

Every hosting account that Eze-Hosting offers has an allocated monthly traffic usage

Over-usage is monitored and automatically billed as per Eze-Hosting’ price schedule: R0.19/ MB for SA traffic over-usage and R1.50/GB for German traffic over-usage.

Where applicable, customers are sent notification emails from Eze-Hosting informing them of any domains that have exceeded the allocated traffic usage quota, providing an opportunity to upgrade to a higher account or transfer to one of our German servers in order to avoid unneces­sary over-usage charges.

This policy is intended to regulate traffic consumption in order to ensure the financial viability of our business model. For most customers, traffic consumption costs are difficult to quantify and a cause for uncertainty. It remains the responsibility of our customers to monitor and request assistance from Eze-Hosting should your usage appear unusual.

7. Security and cracking

Use of Eze-Hosting services to engage in any type of fraud, “cracking”, malicious behaviour, or harassment is expressly forbidden and may constitute a cyber crime under the Electronic Com­munications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 which renders you liable to a fine or imprisonment. Interference with the proper operation of systems reachable via the Internet is forbidden. Compli­ance with the acceptable use policies of any network or system with which you connect through our service is required. Forging e-mail, Usenet postings, or other messages is forbidden. Trafficking in pirated software is forbidden. Port scanning or the use of similar tools is forbidden. Use of Eze-Hosting’ services to publish or otherwise disseminate information about the  availability of pirated software or other material that is being made available illegally, including the publication of a list of links to such material, regardless of disclaimers, is specifically forbidden. We do not condone or encourage any illegal material or behaviour. If inappropriate activity is detected, all accounts of the user in question will be deactivated until the investigation is complete. Prior notification to the user is not assured. In extreme cases, law enforce­ment will be contacted regarding the activity. This policy simply requires that you use your accounts responsibly. Breaking into other systems, try­ing to break into ours, forging messages, swapping games with your friends – all of this is illegal and inappropriate for our user base of Internet professionals. Because of the potential legal and technical risks these activities can present to our service, we de­ activate first, and ask questions later. This is necessary to protect our service for all customers.

8. Disk usage

Every hosting account that Eze-Hosting offers has an allocated disk space usage quota.

Where applicable, customers are sent monthly emails from Eze-Hosting notifying them of any domains that have exceeded the allocated disk space quota, providing an opportunity to reduce disk space or upgrade to a higher account in order to avoid unnecessary charges for over-usage. An important note is that Eze-Hosting will round off over-usage to the nearest 10MB. For example, a Micro Pro account with a quota of 50MB is currently using 58MB of disk space, which is 8MB of over-usage. Eze-Hosting will not charge for this additional usage. However, should the customer increase usage to 61MB, Eze-Hosting will round off over-usage and charge R5 for the extra 10MB block.

In order for Eze-Hosting to operate with greater efficiencies and for our customers to have the flexibility and control of actively managing their disk space, an automated system tracks, notifies and charges for over-usage. Customers can regularly monitor their disk usage via konsoleH by clicking on ‘Disk Usage’ under Statistics & Reports, which will give customers a reading of the total size of the account together with a summary of individual folder sizes.