Introduction

The use of services from Family History Hosting LLC ["Family History Hosting"] indicates the customer's agreement to these terms.

These terms do not apply to software products sold separately; see the license terms provided with those products.

1. Valid E-Mail Address

During the ordering process, you must provide us with an e-mail address which is not at a domain associated with the new account. That e-mail address becomes the "primary e-mail address". If we need to contact you, we will use the primary e-mail address. It is your responsibility to ensure the primary e-mail address is valid at all times. If we can not contact you, you may lose access to our services.

Providing false contact information of any kind may result in a rejected order or termination of an existing account.

2. Account Setup

We will create your account after we have received payment and we and/or our payment partners have screened the order to detect fraud. When the account is ready for your use, we will contact you via the primary e-mail address.

We reserve the right to reject any order you place with us without giving a reason. If we reject your order, we will attempt to notify you using the e-mail address you have given us with the order. Your credit card will normally not be charged if we reject an order, but we will process a refund if the charge has been made against your card.

3. Transfers

We do not provide formal transfer services but we will provide advice on how to transfer web site content from your previous web hosting provider to our servers.

4. Content

All services provided by Family History Hosting may only be used for lawful purposes. The laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States of America apply.

The customer agrees to indemnify and hold harmless Family History Hosting 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. If you believe that your copyright or trademark is being infringed upon, please e-mail us.

Examples of unacceptable materials and processes include:

  • IRC Bots
  • Proxy Scripts / Anonymizers
  • Pirated Software / Warez
  • image, filedump, or banner-ad services (similar to rapidshare, photobucket, or commercial banner ad rotation)
  • topsites
  • commercial audio streaming (more than one or two streams)
  • locally hosted chat scripts
  • Escrow, High-Yield Interest Programs(HYIP) or related sites
  • Investment sites (FOREX, egold exchange)
  • sale of any controlled substance without prior proof of appropriate permit(s)
  • AutoSurf sites
  • Bank Debentures and Bank Debenture Trading Programs,
  • Prime Banks Programs
  • lottery sites
  • hosting for role-playing games (muds / rpgs)
  • hate sites
  • hacker focused sites/archives/programs,
  • sites promoting illegal activities
  • IP Scanners
  • Brute Force Programs
  • Mail Bombers and Spam Scripts

We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Any material that, in our judgment, is obscene or threatening is prohibited and will be removed from our servers with or without notice. Prohibited content includes but is not limited to so-called "adult content" or pornography of any kind.

Failure to respond to an e-mail message from our abuse department within 48 hours may result in the suspension or termination of your services.

If in doubt regarding the acceptability of your site or service, please contact our Sales Department and we will be happy to assist you.

A site whose content represents potential harm to minors is strictly forbidden, including but not limited to child pornography or content perceived to be child pornography. Any site found to host child pornography or linking to child pornography will be suspended immediately 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 username 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.

5. Zero Tolerance Spam Policy

We take a zero tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited e-mail, bulk emailing, and spam. "Safe lists" and "double opt-in" will be treated as spam. Any user who sends out spam will have their account terminated with or without notice.

Please read E-Mail Policy for our generalized 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.

Family History Hosting reserves the right to require changes or disable as necessary any web site, account, database, or other component that does not comply with the established policies of Family History Hosting, or to make any such modifications in an emergency at its sole discretion.

Family History Hosting reserves the right to charge the holder of the account used to send any unsolicited e-mail a clean-up fee. The amount of this fee is entirely at the discretion of Family History Hosting.

6. Backups and Data Loss

Your use of the service is at your sole risk. Family History Hosting 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 Family History Hosting servers.

7. Payment Information

You agree to supply appropriate payment for the services received from Family History Hosting, in advance of the time period during which such services are provided. You agree that until and unless you notify Family History Hosting of your desire to cancel any or all services received, those services will be billed on a recurring basis.

As a client of Family History Hosting, it is your responsibility to ensure that your payment information is up to date, and that all invoices are paid on time. Family History Hosting provides a 10 day grace period from the time the invoice is due and when it must be paid. Any invoice that is overdue 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.

8. Price Changes

Family History Hosting reserves the right to change prices at anytime, but price changes will only affect future services for which you have not yet paid.

9. Cancellations and Refunds

Family History Hosting reserves the right to cancel 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 services.

Customers may cancel at any time using an e-mail message sent from the account's primary e-mail address. We will ask for confirmation of the cancellation via an e-mail reply. Upon receiving the confirmation, we will inform you that your account has been canceled.

We will refund a pro-rated portion of your service fee based on the unused whole calendar months portion of your yearly fee minus a $10 processing fee. If the pro-rated refund is less than or equal to $10 there will be no refund and no processing fee, and the account will remain in service for the duration originally covered by the most recent payment.

Cancellations due to a violations of the Terms of Service are not eligible for a refund.

10. Resource Usage

10a. Processing

User may not:

  • 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.
  • Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
  • Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy).
  • Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
  • Run any bit torrent application, tracker, or client. Please note that you may link to torrents off server, but may not host or store them.
  • Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities
  • Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc.
  • Run cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes

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")

10b. INODE Limit

An INODE is a file or directory. Files use one INODE regardless of the size of the file. Directories also use one INODE. The use of more then 50,000 INODES will result in account suspension. This is a limit enforced by our data center partner; the limit can not be increased.

10c. 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 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.

11. Uptime Guarantee

If the Family History Hosting server used for your account has physical downtime that is not within the 99.9% uptime guarantee, you may receive one month of credit on your account. Approval of the credit is at the discretion of Family History Hosting 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 of the server which may differ from the uptime reported by individual services. To request a credit, please contact sales@familyhistoryhosting.com with justification. All requests must be made in writing via an e-mail message.

12. Indemnification

Customer agrees that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold Family History Hosting harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and claims, including reasonable attorney's fees asserted against Family History Hosting, 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 Family History Hosting against liabilities arising out of; (1) any injury to person or property caused by any products sold or otherwise distributed in connection with Family History Hosting; (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 Family History Hosting's server.

13. Arbitration

By using any Family History Hosting services, you agree to binding arbitration. If any disputes or claims arise against Family History Hosting or its subsidiaries, such disputes will be handled by an arbitrator of Family History Hosting's choice. All decisions rendered by that arbitrator will be binding and final. You are also responsible for any and all costs related to such arbitration.

14. Disclaimer

Family History Hosting shall not be responsible for any damages your business may suffer. Family History Hosting makes no warranties of any kind, expressed or implied for services we provide. Family History Hosting 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 Family History Hosting and its employees.

15. Disclosure to law enforcement

Family History Hosting 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.

16. Changes to the Terms of Service

Family History Hosting reserves the right to revise its policies at any time without notice.