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Website hosting – Acceptable Use Policy

Marksmen IT has developed an Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”), which is intended as a guide to the customer’s obligations when utilising Marksmen IT’s services. Any use of Marksmen IT services constitutes acceptance of these obligations as they are written at the time of each respective use.

Any complaints regarding violation of this AUP should be sent to [email protected].

Your use of the Service must be in compliance with New Zealand laws and laws of your country at all times.

The following conditions apply to customers of Marksmen IT, their customers, affiliates and subsidiaries.

Passwords and Security
Customers of Marksmen IT are required to ensure the security of data uploaded onto and transmitted via our network.

Such security measures include:

  • Keeping all website scripts and code updated;
  • Maintaining secure, confidential passwords;
  • Ensuring the security, validity and good intentions of anybody you grant access to any part of your website, hosting, reseller or resold account(s); and
  • Keeping secure any identification and other confidential information relating to your account.

Secured passwords are ideally considered to be no less than 8 characters in length, containing no dictionary words, and consisting primarily of a random combination of letters, numbers and special characters.

At no time should free unmonitored access to any part of our service unintended for general public consumption be granted or allowed. This includes a strict ban on the provision of “demonstration” accounts, “trial” accounts, or publicly accessible cPanel, webmail, FTP or email login details.

You shall notify us immediately of any unknown or suspected unauthorised use of your account or breach of security, including loss, theft or unauthorised disclosure of your password or other security information.

Accessing illegally, or without authorization, computers, accounts, or networks belonging to Marksmen IT or any other party, or attempting to penetrate security measures of any such system is strictly prohibited.

Any activities that may be used as a precursor to an attempted system penetration (i.e. port scan, stealth scan, or other information gathering activity) are also unacceptable when executed both to or from our networks or equipment.

Software
Data housed or executed within our hosting environment must not cause excessive resource consumption or be in any way detrimental to the performance or integrity of services we provide.

Software specifically prohibited includes, but is not limited to:

  • Proxy scripts;
  • Soap mailers;
  • Non-secure FormMail scripts;
  • Shell emulation scripts;
  • Background-running processes;
  • IRC Bots;
  • warez;
  • Daemons or persistent programs and scripts are also prohibited for customer use on Marksmen IT servers;

Email usage and spam
Marksmen IT does not allow the use of unsolicited commercial email, “Spam” to promote products. Any Member engaging in the sending of Spam or any bulk email originating from our servers mass distributed to unknown recipients soliciting products or services and/or bulk email NOT originating from our servers mass distributed to unknown recipients soliciting products or services relating to a Marksmen IT account will result in immediate account suspension.

Sending unsolicited bulk and/or commercial messages or mail fraud schemes is not acceptable either from or to Marksmen IT servers, nor is the facilitation or aiding of such activity in any way.

We reserve the right to determine the legitimacy and origin of any email sent from, to or through our network and will act as necessary to stop email or messaging activity we consider unlawful or harmful to either the performance of our network and equipment, and/or the reputation of Marksmen IT as a service provider.

Marksmen IT reserves the right to refuse and/or cancel service to known spammers and hackers, or those which have a connection to such parties.

Large volume mail senders should consult with Marksmen IT prior to the sending of legitimate bulk email to acknowledge their compliance with relevant laws relating to email, and to confirm the consent of all intended recipients to receive such email.

Using Marksmen IT’s network as a means to transmit or display defamatory, harassing, abusive, racist or threatening language is also strictly prohibited.

Negligent activities
The following is a non-exclusive list of content and behaviour prohibited by the Service:

  • Advertising, transmitting or making available any software, program, product, service or information pertaining to or facilitating the creation or sending of Internet viruses, worms, Trojan horses, pinging, flooding, mailbombing, or denial of service attacks is absolutely prohibited. Any activity that disrupts the use of, or interferes with, the ability of others to effectively use the network or any connected network, system, service, or equipment is prohibited.
  • Engaging in activities that are determined to be illegal, including advertising, transmitting, or otherwise making available ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, phishing pages, fraudulently charging credit cards, and pirating software may result in removal or interruption of your services and data without notice.
  • Engaging in activities, whether lawful or unlawful, that Marksmen IT determines to be harmful to its clients, operations, reputation, goodwill, or customer relations may result in the loss of access to services or the termination of our agreement. Marksmen IT will be the sole arbiter of what constitutes a violation of this policy.
  • You are responsible for ensuring that your use of the Service does not consume excessive system or network resources that disrupts the normal use of the Service through, but not limited to, spawning multiple processes, consuming excessive amounts of memory, CPU or bandwidth usage.
  • Content that contains or contains links to: pornography or other illegal content under applicable law.
  • Content that condones, promotes, contains, or links to “warez”, cracks, hacks, their associated utilities, or other piracy related information, whether for educational purposes or not.
  • Content that is grossly offensive to the community, including blatant expressions for bigotry, prejudice, racism, hatred or excessive profanity, or to post any obscene, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable material.
  • Content or otherwise that exploits children under 18 years of age.
  • Content that sells or promotes any products or services that are unlawful in the location at which the content is posted or received.
  • Content that infringes on or violates any copyright, patent, trademark, service mark, trade name, trade secret, or other intellectual property rights of any third party.
  • Content that promotes mail fraud, multi-level marketing (pyramid) schemes or other illegal or fraudulent activities.
  • Content that posts or discloses any personally identifying information or private information about any third parties without their express consent.
  • Reverse engineering, reverse compiling or otherwise deriving the underlying source code or structure or sequence of any Marksmen IT service, solution or technology.
  • Reverse engineering, reverse compiling or otherwise deriving the underlying source code or structure or sequence of individual passwords of Member Sites (or pages contained therein).
  • Allowing our services to be used as data storage beyond what is reasonable when running a website.
  • Allowing your consumption of server or network resources to reach excessive amounts or using the services in any way which results in server performance issues or which interferes with the service quality for other Customers.
    A customer engaging in any of the above activities may result in having their account suspended.

Servers or Network Abuse
You shall observe the procedures which we may from time to time prescribe and shall make no use of the Server which is detrimental to our other customers.

You shall procure to transmit all data to, from, or within our networks and equipment in accordance with applicable legislation, our Terms and Conditions, any other policies governing the use of services, and in a secure manner.

Any access to other networks connected in any way to the services offered by Marksmen IT must comply with the rules appropriate for those other networks.

While we will use every reasonable endeavour to ensure the integrity and security of the Server, we do not guarantee that the Server will be free from unauthorised users and we shall be under no liability for non-receipt or misrouting of email or any other failure of email.

A customer is prohibited from taking part in the following:

  • Any attempts to cause harm to any of our servers or network infrastructure;
  • Logging or trying to log into a server or account, which such customer is not authorised to access;
  • Attempting to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of a system or network or to breach security or authentication measures without proper authorization;
  • Attempting to interfere with the services of other customers, host or network, including but not limited to “flooding”, “mail bombing”, spoofing” or “crashing”;
  • Forging or altering any TCP/IP packet header or any part of the header information in any e-mail or newsgroup posting;
  • any e-mail or newsgroup posting;
  • Hosting or linking to an anonymous proxy server;
  • Operating a file sharing site; and
  • Hosting scripts or processes that adversely impact our systems;

If a customer is suspected of any of the above, Marksmen IT will immediately suspend their accounts and services, and a full investigation will be conducted before a decision is made on the reinstatement of a customer’s account, at Marksmen IT’s full discretion. Any decisions by Marksmen IT are final.

Abusive Customer Behaviour
Abusive behaviour towards our staff is expressly prohibited. Abusive behaviour includes, but is not limited to, insulting or degrading language and discriminatory remarks. In the event, a customer abuses a member of our staff, Marksmen IT reserves the right to terminate all agreements with the customer.

Disruptive Use
Shared hosting space is not designed to be used for long term storage, backups or archiving, including without limitation, of media, emails, as offsite storage of electronic files, or FTP hosts. Disk space is intended for use in accordance with this policy and Marksmen IT’s Terms and Conditions and is limited to web files, active email (i.e. those sent or received in the last 12 months) and User Website content only. Data uploaded must be primarily for this purpose. Marksmen IT expressly reserves the right to review every user account for excessive usage of CPU, bandwidth, disk space and other resources that may be a result of your violation of this Agreement or the Terms and Conditions. Marksmen IT reserves the right to delete users’ backups or archives if they affect our overall server performance and Marksmen IT shall have no liability to you or any other person for loss, damage or destruction of any of your content.

Network, Bandwidth and Disk Space
You have been allocated the usage of bandwidth and or disk space per month for the service(s) ordered on the order form/ package/special pricing agreed upon at the time of placing the order(s). All bandwidth usage is monitored as far as possible for usage during any given calendar month, and is governed by the Fair Use Policy.

Marksmen IT cannot be held liable for loss of access to the subscribed services when you deplete the allocated bandwidth/disk space based on the package agreed upon.

Bandwidth on shared and reseller web hosting packages roll over at the end of the calendar month. Bandwidth on Virtual Private Server packages roll over at the end of your billing cycle.

Marksmen IT provides unmetered data on shared/reseller hosting and colocation packages which offer generous fair use data transfer. Data transfer covers bandwidth both Nationally (New Zealand), and International data per month. This unmetered bandwidth provides customers with up to 1TB of data transfer per month as they wish to use without any additional charge. Customers may use this data for any purpose other than those unacceptable as stated in this Policy. Customers will receive a notice warning upon reaching 80% of this limit. Usage beyond this limit may incur additional charges.

Should Marksmen IT Limited deem a customer’s account as exceeding fair use bandwidth consumption which causes interference with other users, Marksmen IT will notify the customer and allow the customer to remedy the problem. However, should a customers’ bandwidth usage be significantly greater than fair use, Marksmen IT reserves the right to suspend or throttle the customers account where appropriate. Marksmen IT will discuss the available options that could provide better service for the customer.

Unlimited Hosting Space; Excessive Server Resources:
The Services will be provided to you as configured for our standard customer. While rare, when performance on a server is compromised due to excessive demands by an individual website, we may need to temporarily constrain websites that are using more server resources than needed by a standard site. You will bear ultimate responsibility to ensure that the Services are configured to meet your operational, privacy and security needs. For those websites that are consistently making excessive demands above the normal operation of a website, including those that are not in compliance with our Terms and Conditions, we may suspend or terminate the account in question or ask that the customer adjust the web hosting plan they are currently on to one that better matches the needs of their website. Marksmen IT will not be obliged to modify the Services to accommodate your use.

Other Resources
Marksmen IT provides unlimited Email accounts and MySQL databases on its reseller hosting plans. This provides our customers with the choice and control over the amount they provide to their own hosting clients. Customers may use these features as they like but must stay within reasonable standards of fair use. Should Marksmen IT find that a customer’s account is abusing this feature, Marksmen IT will notify the customer and allow the customer to remedy the problem. If the customer’s account continues to exceed fair use, Marksmen IT reserves the right to suspend the customer’s account and discuss a more suitable option that would provide a better service for the customer.

Customer Costs
You, the Customer, must provide and pay for any other equipment needed to access the Service at your own cost, and agree that Marksmen IT will not provide software or advice as to how to use the service without payment, for any consultancy service. You will be liable for all fees and expenses incurred by any security breach, attack or customer error that involves your hardware, software, or network configuration.

Scripts
Any script that negatively impacts our network and/or server’s performance may be deleted without notice. This includes any code which processes on the server regardless of the language that was used.

Reseller
Customers on Marksmen IT reseller hosting plans are responsible for the actions of their own clients. You must use reasonable efforts to secure any device or network with your control against being used in breach of your applicable laws against spam and unsolicited email, including where appropriate by the installation of antivirus software, firewall software and operating system and applicable software patches and upgrades. Our right to suspend or terminate your service applies even if a breach is committed unintentionally or without your authorization, including through a Trojan horse or virus.

If your client’s actions violate Marksmen IT any of the policies governing Marksmen IT products and services to you, Marksmen IT will suspend their account and will send a notice about the issue to your contact email address through our support portal. Where this is not possible, Marksmen IT will provide a warning and reasonable time to ensure the policies are met.

Parked Domains
For performance and reliability, we need to limit and control the number of separate websites hosted on our servers. We rely on the fact that one hosting account generally equals one website.

For this reason, “parked” domain names – that is, additional domain names that we park onto an existing account for you – are to be used solely for the purpose of displaying the same content as the domain name we’re parking them onto. They are not to be used for providing the appearance of separate websites within a single account.

For those wanting to host multiple websites, we offer resellers hosting plans, as well as free parking for domain-names on all of our plans.

General
Marksmen IT reserves the right to determine what violates this policy, including the right to add or modify this AUP at Marksmen IT’s sole discretion. Enforcement of this AUP may be with or without notice. Violations will be reported to law enforcement as determined by Marksmen IT in its sole discretion. As a web host, Marksmen IT is not the publisher of its customers’ content and as such we are not able to determine the veracity of defamation allegations. It is the jurisdiction of the courts to determine whether content is defamatory, and where a court orders material to be removed, Marksmen IT will disable access to such material.

You will be notified of any changes made to this AUP upon modification. Violation of Marksmen IT policies and conditions removes the customers’ right for refunds of any paid service.