Legal Policies
Acceptable Usage Policy ("AUP")
This policy is applicable to all variants of Top Hosting Center Cloud Hosting and Cloud Server products.Your services may be suspended or terminated for violation of this AUP in accordance with the Top Hosting Center Cloud Terms of Service (TOS).
Capitalized terms used in this AUP shall have the meaning given in the Terms of Service. Inquiries regarding this policy should be directed to our email: abuse (at) tophostingcenter (dot) com.
Abuse
You may not use the Top Hosting Center Cloud's network or Services to engage in, foster, or promote illegal, abusive, or irresponsible behavior, including:
- Unauthorized 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 without express authorization of the owner of the system or network;
- Monitoring data or traffic on any network or system without the express authorization of the owner of the system or network;
- Interference with service to any user of the Top Hosting Center Cloud or other network including, without limitation, mail bombing, flooding, deliberate attempts to overload a system and broadcast attacks;
- Use of an Internet account or computer without the owner's authorization;
- Collecting or using email addresses, screen names or other identifiers without the consent of the person identified (including, without limitation, phishing, Internet scamming, password robbery, spidering, and harvesting);
- Collecting or using information without the consent of the owner of the information;
- Use of any false, misleading, or deceptive TCP-IP packet header information in an email or a newsgroup posting;
- Use of the service to distribute software that covertly gathers information about a user or covertly transmits information about the user;
- Use of the service for distribution of advertisement delivery software unless: (i) the user affirmatively consents to the download and installation of such software based on a clear and conspicuous notice of the nature of the software, and (ii) the software is easily removable by use of standard tools for such purpose included on major operating systems; (such as Microsoft's "ad/remove" tool); or
- Any conduct that is likely to result in retaliation against the Top Hosting Center Cloud network or website, or the Top Hosting Center Cloud's employees, officers or other agents, including engaging in behavior that results in any server being the target of a denial of service attack (DoS).
Excessive Use of System Resources
You may not use your Service in a way that unnecessarily interferes with the normal operation of the Top Hosting Center Cloud services generally. In such circumstances, we may require you to repair abnormalities in your code if the operation of the code unnecessary conflicts with other customers' use of their services.
Bulk or Commercial E-Mail
You must obtain the Top Hosting Center Cloud's advance approval for any bulk or commercial e-mail, which will not be given unless you are able to demonstrate, at a minimum, that:
- your intended recipients have given their consent to receive e-mail via some affirmative means, such as an opt-in procedure;
- your procedures for soliciting consent include reasonable means to ensure that the person giving consent is the owner of the e-mail address for which the consent is given;
- you retain evidence of the recipient's consent in a form that may be promptly produced on request, and you honor the recipient's and the Top Hosting Center Cloud's requests to produce consent evidence within 72 hours of receipt of the request;
- You have procedures in place that allow a recipient to revoke their consent – such as a link in the body of the email, or instructions to reply with the word "Remove" in the subject line; you honor revocations of consent within 48 hours, and you notify recipients that the revocation of their consent will be implemented in 48 hours;
- You must post an email address for complaints (such as abuse@yourdomain.com) in a conspicuous place on any website associated with the email, you must register that address at abuse.net, and you must promptly respond to messages sent to that address;
- You must have a Privacy Policy posted for each domain associated with the mailing;
- You have the means to track anonymous complaints;
- You must not obscure the source of your e-mail in any manner. Your e-mail must include the recipient's e-mail address in the body of the message or in the "TO" line of the e-mail;
- You must not attempt to send any message to an email address if 3 consecutive delivery rejections have occurred and the time between the third rejection and the first rejection is longer than fifteen days.
- These policies apply to messages sent using the Services, or to messages sent from any network by you or any person on your behalf that directly or indirectly refer the recipient to a site hosted via the Services. In addition, you may not use a third party e-mail service that does not practice similar procedures for all its customers. These requirements apply to distribution lists created by third parties to the same extent as if the list were created by you.
- The Top Hosting Center Cloud may test and otherwise monitor your compliance with its requirements, including requesting opt-in information from a random sample of your list at any time. In addition, the Top Hosting Center Cloud may block the transmission of email that violates these provisions.
Authenticated SMTP Policy
In addition to the requirements above, you may not send email messages of similar content through the Top Hosting Center Cloud's SMTP servers to more than two-hundred and fifty (250) recipients. Attempts to circumvent this restriction by breaking up bulk email over time, using multiple accounts, or other means will be a violation of this restriction.
The Top Hosting Center Cloud may block mail that violates this AUP. In addition, your mail services may be suspended or terminated for violation of this AUP in accordance with the Terms of Service.
Mail Relays
Generally, we do not allow bulk or commercial e-mail to be sent to more than five-thousand (5,000) users per day at a rate of 250 messages every 20 minutes. If you would like to send more than 5,000 messages per day, please contact a member of our support team for additional information.
Vulnerability Testing
You may not attempt to probe, scan, penetrate or test the vulnerability of a Top Hosting Center Cloud system or network or to breach the Top Hosting Center Cloud's security or authentication measures, whether by passive or intrusive techniques, without the Top Hosting Center Cloud's express written consent.
Newsgroup, Chat Forums, Other Networks
You must comply with the rules and conventions for postings to any bulletin board, chat group or other forum in which you participate, such as IRC and USENET groups including their rules for content and commercial postings. These groups usually prohibit the posting of off-topic commercial messages, or mass postings to multiple forums.
You must comply with the rules of any other network you access or participate in using your the Top Hosting Center Cloud services.
Offensive Content
You may not publish, transmit or store on or via the Top Hosting Center Cloud's network and equipment any content or links to any content that the Top Hosting Center Cloud reasonably believes:
- Constitutes, depicts, fosters, promotes or relates in any manner to child pornography, bestiality, or non-consensual sex acts;
- is excessively violent, incites violence, threatens violence or contains harassing content 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, creates a risk to public safety or health, compromises national security or interferes with a investigation by law enforcement;
- improperly exposes trade secrets or other confidential or proprietary information of another person;
- is intended to assist others in defeating technical copyright protections;
- infringes on another person's copyright, trade or service mark, patent or other property right;
- promotes illegal drugs, violates export control laws, relates to illegal gambling or illegal arms trafficking;
- is otherwise illegal or solicits conduct that is illegal under laws applicable to you or to the Top Hosting Center Cloud; or
- is otherwise malicious, fraudulent or may result in retaliation against the Top Hosting Center Cloud by offended viewers.
- Content "published or transmitted" via the Top Hosting Center Cloud's network or equipment includes Web content, email, bulletin board postings, chat and any other type of posting or transmission that relies on the Internet.
Copyrighted Material
You may not use the Top Hosting Center Cloud's network or Services to download, publish, distribute, or otherwise copy or use in any manner any text, music, software, art, image or other work protected by copyright law unless:
- you have been expressly authorized by the owner of the copyright for the work to copy the work in that manner; or
- you are otherwise permitted by established copyright law to copy the work in that manner.
It is the Top Hosting Center Cloud's policy to terminate in appropriate circumstances the services of customers who are repeat infringers.
Other
You must have valid and current information on file with your domain name registrar for any domain hosted on the Top Hosting Center Cloud network.
- You may only use IP addresses assigned to you by the Top Hosting Center Cloud in connection with your the Top Hosting Center Cloud services.
- You agree that if the Top Hosting Center Cloud IP numbers assigned to your account are listed on an abuse database like Spamhaus, you will be in violation of this AUP, and the Top Hosting Center Cloud may take reasonable action to protect its IP numbers, including suspension and/or termination of your service, regardless of whether the IP numbers were listed as a result of your actions;
- You agree that we may quarantine or delete any data stored on a shared system if the data is infected with a virus, or is otherwise corrupted, and has the potential to infect or corrupt the system or other customers' data that is stored on the same system.
Bandwidth Usage Policy
The Top Hosting Center bandwidth policy is simple! You are allotted a portion of bandwidth per month to do with as you please.
For shared hosting plans, if the amount of data transfer exceeds the user's plan subscription, the account will not be suspended but the user will receive a warning through an email, and you maybe contacted by THC staff for overuse and you may be given positive options. However, for dedicated server hosting, if you go over your allotted amount of bandwidth in a given month, your account will not be suspended or terminated but you will be expected to pay for the additional bandwidth.
Top Hosting Center provides a bandwidth estimate figure in your control panel. This is an estimate and is provided from the server level. Actual account bandwidth usage is measured for billing purposes at the port level. This policy exists because many users offer files for download via FTP which is not otherwise measured by the server directly at this time. Please note that because the bandwidth is monitored at the port, any and all traffic for your Web Site is tracked including, but not limited to: FTP uploads and downloads, mail sending and retrieval, normal Web traffic, etc. Everything that is pushed from our server to a third-party's machine is considered bandwidth and will be measured.
We have designed this policy because many users find that hosts offer "unlimited" bandwidth only to find out that it has a very real bandwidth limit. Further, they place restrictions on what you can use the bandwidth for (i.e. no image galleries because they are a large source of bandwidth consumption). We tell you up-front how much bandwidth you are allocated each month and you have the full amount to use.
It is important to note that many sites don't use more than 1 GB of bandwidth. Your site has to be very popular or very graphic intensive to use more than 1 GB. If you are unsure of your bandwidth usage prior to moving your site to TopHostingCenter, contact us. We would be happy to review your current site statistics with you to help you choose the right package.
Script Usage Policy
THC provides our clients with Web Hosting accounts that permit the use of CGI files, PHP scripts, and other executable programs. Because these scripts use much more system resources than standard HTML pages, certain restrictions must be made governing the use of such "active content" systems. We regret that in many cases we are unable to determine what specific script or application is causing the system resource over-run. Under most circumstances, we are able to pin-point it to the offending account on the system. The following rules apply to all "active content" files as listed above:
- The script must use low system resources. Scripts that consume a large amount of our RAM or processor will be subject to immediate suspension until the owner can be notified and an alternative solution is reached.
- Each user account may not use more than 20% of system resources at any given time. If an account is consistently using 20% or greater system resources, the account holder will be warned and if no action is taken on behalf of the account holder the account may be suspended.
- The scripts may not interact with any server configuration or hardware. Accounts running these scripts are subject to immediate account termination without refund.
- The script can not be used or referenced from any other site not hosted by THC.
- The script must execute in a timely fashion. Any script that uses the processor for more than a few milliseconds is subject to removal.
- Any script that appears to be designed specifically to attack or otherwise maliciously affect the server is completely unacceptable, and if such scripts are found in your account the account will be terminated immediately and your actions will be reported to the proper local, state, and federal authorities and legal action will be taken to prosecute the account holder to the fullest extent of the law by THC.
- Perl-based chat room scripts are strictly prohibited.
- Scripts that require high-bandwidth usage, such as non-Perl chat room scripts or banner rotation scripts, will be allowed to run only on our high-end accounts.
- Scripts must be kept secure. Unnecessary chmoding scripts to 777 is a violation of this policy. Keeping scripts in a publicly viewable directory (one without a index.html file) is also in violation of this policy. NOTE: If a script will NOT execute with a permission other than 777 (rarely the case) you may contact customer care to get approval for the script which will be given under most circumstances.
Any accounts with scripts found in violation of these policies are subject to future scrutiny of all CGI, Perl, CFM, ASP, and PHP scripts by our System Administrators. If a script is found to be harmful to the system, it will be killed immediately and the account locked down until the account owners have been contacted. Malicious scripts are subject to immediate account termination without refund of any pre-paid monies.
Why do we have this policy?
A Virtual Server is shared. As such, there are many accounts per machine. In all fairness,THC cannot allow one or two clients to use all of the System resources on a shared machine and have all other clients on the machine suffer because of it. Excessive CPU usage by one or more clients causes extreme slowness in all areas: FTP, Telnet, Web Sites and more. If the CPU usage gets too far out of hand, all sites hosted on the machine will return Errors and not be accessible in any way.
What happens if I violate this policy?
All accounts that are found to using excessive amounts of system resources will receive an email warning from THC. This warning will inform you that there is too much CGI running and it will provide options for reducing the usage or upgrading your server. If you do not reduce the usage within 24 hours of the email being sent, your account will be cancelled.
Privacy Policy and Terms of Service
Terms and Conditions for 30-day Money-back Guarantee
Usage
- The THC Money Back Guarantee applies to Linux and Microsoft Shared Hosting, Microsoft Exchange Hosting, and VPS (Virtual Private Servers).
- Refund only applies to monthly fees.
- The THC Money Back Guarantee does not apply to dedicated managed THC Server products. All monthly and setup fees for dedicated managed Server products are non-refundable.
- The THC Money Back Guarantee starts on the date when the initial order was placed.
- The THC Money Back Guarantee is 7 days for all reseller plan ( this is not apply on shared hosting plan, VPS and Dedicated servers and even upgrade parts )
Domain Names
THC has no refund policy for domain name registration fees.
Bandwidth
- THC has no refund policy for unused bandwidth.
- Upon availing of the 30-day Money Back Guarantee, a customer whose account exceeds the included bandwidth will be required to pay the additional bandwidth accrued.
Miscellaneous
- THC has no refund policy on additional or optional services/ features added from the Control Panel by the customer.
- Customers switching from one THC package to another THC package shall be deemed to have exhausted the 30-day period, and are no longer eligible for the Money Back Guarantee.
- A customer can only use the Money Back Guarantee once, and for only one account.
- The 30-day money back guarantee does NOT apply to software.
- A customer whose account has been suspended or terminated due to the breach of any part of the THC