Terms of Service

The use of services from AlternativeHosts.com [hereafter referred to as "AlternativeHosts"] constitutes agreement to these terms. You may view our Privacy Policy here.

1.) Account Setup / Email on file

We will setup your account after we have received payment and we and/or our payment partner(s) have screened the order(s) incase of fraud. It is your responsibility to provide us with an email address which is not @ the domain(s) you are signing up under. If there is ever an abuse issue or we need to contact you, the primary email address on file will be used for this purpose. It is your responsibility to ensure the email address on file is current or up to date at all times. Providing false contact information of any kind may result in the termination of your account. If you fail to meet these requirements, the order may be considered fraudulent in nature and be denied.

Transfers Our transfers team will make every effort to help you move your site to us, however, we can not make guarantees of the transfer process. We provide this as a courtesy service and can not make guarantees regarding its availability or the amount of time it may take as each host is configured a little differently. We will try our best, however, in some cases we may be unable to assist you in a transfer of data from an old host.

2.) Contents

All services provided by AlternativeHosts may only be used for lawful purposes. The laws of the Kingdom of Sweden apply.

The customer agrees to indemnify and hold harmless AlternativeHosts 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 email abuse@alternativehosts.com with the information required.

Examples of unacceptable material on all Shared and Reseller servers include:

IRC Bots, Proxy Scripts / Anonymizers, Pirated Software / Warez, image, filedump, mirror, or banner-ad services (similar to rapidshare, photobucket, or commercial banner ad rotation), affiliate servers, topsites, commercial audio streaming (more than one or two streams), 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, Bank Debenture Trading Programs, Prime Banks Programs, lottery sites, muds / rpg's, hate sites, hacker focused sites/archives/programs, or sites promoting illegal activities, IP Scanners, Brute Force Programs, Mail Bombers and Spam Scripts. Forums and or websites that distribute or link to warez content are prohibited.

Using a shared account as a backup/storage device is not permitted, with the exception of one cPanel backup of the same account.

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.

Failure to respond to email from our abuse department within 48 hours may result in the suspension or termination of your services. All abuse issues must be dealt with via troubleticket/email and will have a response within 48 hours.

If in doubt regarding the acceptability of your site or service, please contact us at abuse@alternativehosts.com and we will be happy to assist you.

Potential harm to minors is strictly forbidden, including but not limited to child pornography or content perceived to be child pornography (Lolita):

Any site found to host child pornography or linking to child pornography will be suspended immediately without notice.

Resellers: we will suspend the site in question and will notify you so you may terminate the account. We will further monitor your activity; more than one infraction of this type may result in the immediate termination of your account.

Direct customers: Your services will be terminated with or 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.

3.) 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.

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.

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

AlternativeHosts reserves the right to charge the holder of the account used to send any unsolicited e-mail a clean up fee. This cost of the clean up fee is entirely at the discretion of AlternativeHosts.

4.) Payment Information

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

Cancellations must be done in writing via the cancellation mail. Once we receive your cancellation e-mail and have confirmed all necessary information, we will inform you that your account has been canceled. At this time, your account with us has been canceled. If you do not hear back from us or receive an e-mail confirming this cancellation, please contact us immediately.

As a client of AlternativeHosts, it is your responsibility to ensure that your payment information is up to date, and that all invoices are paid on time. AlternativeHosts provides a 15 day grace period from the time the invoice is due and when it must be paid. Any invoice that is overdue for 15 days and not paid will result in a fine of 20% of due payment in addition to the payment that is already due and/or an account suspension until account balance has been paid in full.

AlternativeHosts reserves the right to change the monthly payment amount and any other charges at anytime.

5.) Backups and Data Loss

Your use of the service is at your sole risk. AlternativeHosts 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 AlternativeHosts servers.

6.) Cancellations and Refunds

AlternativeHosts 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 your services.

Customers may cancel at any time via a cancellation e-mail. AlternativeHosts gives you an unconditional 30 day money back guarantee on managed shared hosting, and reseller solutions for any customer who paid the first invoice with Paypal.

All other methods of payments are non-refundable, and refunds will be posted as credit to the hosting account.

There are no refunds on administrative fees, install fees for custom software, or domain name purchases.

Only first-time accounts are eligible for a refund. For example, if you've had an account with us before, cancelled and signed up again, you will not be eligible for a refund or if you have opened a second account with us.

Violations of the Terms of Service will waive the refund policy.

7a.) Resource Usage

User may not:
a) 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.
b) Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
c) Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy) on shared servers.
d) Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
e) Use server primarily for sending mass mails. There is a restriction on sending no more than 400 emails per hour, and to no more than 50 recipients at once. Please note the restrictions are on per domain basis.
f) 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.
g) Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities.
h) Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc.
i) Run cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes.

7b.) INODES

The use of more than 50,000 inodes on any shared account may potentially result in suspension. Accounts found to be exceeding the 50,000 inode limit will automatically be removed from our backup system to avoid overusage. Every file (a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode.

Sites that slightly exceed our inode limits are unlikely to be suspended; however, accounts that constantly create and delete large numbers of files on a regular basis, have hundreds of thousands of files, or cause file system damage may be flagged for review and/or suspension.
The primary cause of excessive inodes seems to be due to users leaving their catchall address enabled, but never checking their primary account mailbox. Over time, tens of thousands of messages (or more) build up, eventually pushing the account past our inode limit. To disable your default mailbox, login to cPanel and choose "Mail", then "Default Address", "Set Default Address", and then type in: :fail: No such user here

8.) 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 of 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.

9a.) Money back Guarantee

Each of AlternativeHosts's managed shared and reseller servers carry a 30 day unconditional money back guarantee on them. If you are not completely satisfied with our services within the first 30 days of your service, you will be given a full refund of the contract amount. Remember, this is only for monthly shared or reseller packages, but not on to the administrative fees, install fees for custom software, or domain name purchases.

9b.) Uptime Guarantee

If your shared / reseller server has a physical downtime that is not within the 99.9% uptime you may receive one month of credit on your account. Approval of the credit is at the discretion of AlternativeHosts 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 and the Apache Web Server which may differ from the uptime reported by other individual services. To request a credit, please contact sales@alternativehosts.com with justification. All requests must be made in writing via email. Uptime guarantees only apply to shared / reseller solutions.

10.) Reseller: Client Responsibility

Resellers are responsible for supporting their clients. AlternativeHosts does not provide support to our Reseller's Clients. If a reseller's client contacts us, we reserve the right to place the client account on hold until the reseller can assume their responsibility for their client. All support requests must be made by the reseller on their clients' behalf for security purposes. Resellers are also responsible for all content stored or transmitted under their reseller account and the actions of their clients'. AlternativeHosts will hold any reseller responsible for any of their clients actions that violate the law or the terms of service.

11.) Shared (non-reseller accounts)

Shared accounts may not resell web hosting to other people, if you wish to resell hosting you must use a reseller account.

12.) Price Change

The amount you pay for hosting will never increase from the date of purchase. We reserve the right to change prices listed on AlternativeHosts.com, and the right to increase the amount of resources given to plans at any time.

13a.) Indemnification

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

13b.) Arbitration

By using any AlternativeHosts services, you agree to submit to binding arbitration. If any disputes or claims arise against AlternativeHosts or its subsidiaries, such disputes will be handled by an arbitrator of AlternativeHosts's choice. Arbitrators shall be attorneys or retired judges and shall be selected pursuant to the applicable rules. All decisions rendered by the arbitrator will be binding and final. The arbitrator's award is final and binding on all parties. You are also responsible for any and all costs related to such arbitration.

14.) Disclaimer

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

15.) Disclosure to law enforcement

AlternativeHosts 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 TOS

AlternativeHosts reserves the right to revise its policies at any time without notice.