SERVICES

This Service Agreement ("Agreement") applies to the purchase of all services, packages, options, including but not limited to related web design, programming, and technical support services (collectively, the "Services") ordered by you on the HostMe.co.nz website hosting Sign Up Page OR which you may order at any time and from time to time. HostMe.co.nz (trading as Website Services) reserves the right to amend its web hosting and related Service offerings and to add, delete, suspend or modify the terms and conditions of the Services, at any time and from time to time, and to determine whether and when any such changes apply to both existing or future customers.

HostMe.co.nz provides web hosting to numerous clients which means that we have a responsibility to protect each client and to provide the best services available. The following was established to ensure these crucial obligations are met.

These Policies, Guidelines, and Disclaimer are intended for all domains residing on HostMe.co.nz servers, including regular hosting clients, resellers, and their clients. We ask that all clients reselling our hosting services in any way, including those providing non-virtual hosting services, implement (as a minimum) the same Policies, Guidelines, and Disclaimers into their own web sites to ensure that the same are understood and met by their clients.

BILLING AND PAYMENT

You shall pay the fees and other charges for each Service as provided in the HostMe.co.nz website hosting Sign Up Page and in our pricing and plans statement or our standard schedule of prices, as the same may be amended from time to time.

HostMe.co.nz reserves the right to change rates by notifying you sixty (60) days in advance of the effective date of the change.

Overdue Accounts: You will pay a late payment charge equal to 10% of the total outstanding balance of any invoice remaining unpaid after the "Due Date". Accounts unpaid after the Due Date may also have service suspended or terminated at any time without warning. Such suspension or termination shall not relieve you of your obligation to pay the fees and charges due. You agree to pay HostMe.co.nz its reasonable expenses, including legal fees and collection agency fees, incurred in enforcing its rights under this Agreement.

AUTOMATIC CONTRACT RENEWAL

When your contract is up, it will automatically renew. You will be invoiced up to 14 days prior to contract renewal, either monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, or annually, whichever you selected when you signed up.

If you would like to cancel your contract, you must email billing@hostme.co.nz requesting account termination. Allow at least 72 hours for account deletion.

As a policy, we do not offer refunds.

RESELLERS

Resellers and their clients are bound by these same Policies, Guidelines and Disclaimers. By reselling and purchasing HostMe.co.nz services, you hereby agree that HostMe.co.nz shall not be held liable for any promises or failure of same that Reseller's extend to their clients, including but not limited to, quality of service, financial obligations, financial losses or any other claim NOT provided to Reseller in writing by HostMe.co.nz.

TRAFFIC RESTRICTIONS / BANDWIDTH

None of our packages come with unlimited bandwidth. Our Domain Hosting Management System will automatically suspend accounts which exceed the monthly bandwidth limit.

The bandwidth usage can be found in your Control Panel and should be monitored.

Bandwidth is allocated on a calendar month. Bandwidth is reset at the end of each month.

You may at any time upgrade your plan and/or purchase additional bandwidth as needed to prevent your website from exceeding its set bandwidth limit.

For websites on New Zealand located servers; Any individual website whose total monthly bandwidth usage consists of 60% or more of International traffic (traffic that originates from outside of New Zealand), may at the discretion of HostMe.co.nz be moved to a server outside of NZ (either Australia or U.S.).

UNACCEPTABLE ACTIVITIES

These include spamming (sending unsolicited advertising to those with which the customer has no existing business relationship, posting off-topic advertising in newsgroups); spoofing (using a return email address which is not the valid reply address of the sender or sending an email message which does not contain enough information to enable the recipient to identify the party who is really sending the message; passive spamming (promoting a web site hosted by HostMe.co.nz by spamming from some other source), trolling (posting controversial messages in newsgroups to generate responses), mailbombing (inundating a user with email without any serious intent to correspond), generating a higher volume of outgoing mail than a normal user (20% or more of available system resources), and subscribing someone else to an electronic mailing list without that person's permission. A message is considered unsolicited if it is posted in violation of a newsgroup charter or sent to a recipient who has not requested the message. Making an email address available to the public does not constitute a request to receive messages.

All recipients on a mailing list must have personally subscribed. Mailing lists may not be used to distributed unsolicited email.

Any customer repeatedly "mailbombed" or that attracts such behavior will be asked to resolve the issue, and if the problem persists may have services suspended without further warning.

If you are not sure if your actions will be in violation, please ask first abuse@websiteservices.co.nz. We also do not allow sites selling spamware.

Age

The client must be 18 years of age to obtain our service.

Abuse of the legal rights of others

Examples of unacceptable activities in this regard include posting private information about a person without their consent, infringing intellectual property rights, defaming a person or business, and knowingly making available code which will have a deleterious effect on third party computers.

HostMe.co.nz supports free speech on the Internet, and will not suspend or cancel a customer’s account simply because it disagrees with the views expressed by the customer.

Where there are allegations that a customer’s on-line activity has violated the legal rights of a third party, HostMe.co.nz will not substitute itself for a court of law in deciding tort claims raised by the third party.

Abuse of the law

HostMe.co.nz services may be used for lawful purposes only.

Illegality includes but is not limited to: drug dealing; attempting without authorization to access a computer system; pirating (distributing copyrighted material in violation of copyright law, specifically MP3s, MPEG's, ROMs, and ROM emulators); gambling; schemes to defraud; trafficking in obscene material; sending a message or having content that is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another person; threatening bodily harm or damage to individuals or groups; stalking. Linking to illegal material is also prohibited.

HostMe.co.nz reserves the right to check system files, email, and other data on our servers for illegal content and materials, or for any other reasons deemed necessary.

Pornography

Pornography and sex-related merchandising, or links to such material, even if legal is not acceptable use of our servers unless prior consent to a customer has been granted.

Consent can only be granted to a customer by HostMe.co.nz.

Abuse of HostMe.co.nz Server Resources

Running programs in the background on a HostMe.co.nz server without HostMe.co.nz prior written authorization, or running chat rooms, Internet Relay Chat, IRC bots, and the like are not acceptable uses of HostMe.co.nz servers.

Further, any usage of 20% or more of an individual server system resource (e.g. Apache, E-mail, MySQL) is an undue burden on our system and is unacceptable. If your usage ever exceeds 20%, the system process may be terminated and you will be contacted and asked to eliminate the problem.

Hacking/Cracking

HostMe.co.nz reserves the right to report illegal activities to any and all regulatory, administrative, and/or governmental authorities for prosecution.

OTHER BEHAVIOR

The following examples of unacceptable behavior are non-exclusive, and are provided for guidance purposes. If you are unsure if your actions will be a violation of our policies please ask abuse@websiteservices.co.nz

Server broadcast messages or any message sent on an intrusive basis to any directly or indirectly attached network Attempt to circumvent any user authentication or security of host, network, or account. Accessing data not intended for user. Probing the security of any network. Spawning excessive processes. Port scans, ping floods, packet spoofing, forging router information, Denial of Service attacks, sniffers, flooding, spoofing, ping bombing, smurfs, winnuke, land, teardrop. Promulgation of viruses. IRC bots such as eggdrop or BitchX. Any activity, whether or not the intrusion results in the corruption or loss of data, will be investigated and proper action taken. The presence of any of these programs, whether or not run, will result in action against the user including suspension or termination.

CLIENT RESPONSIBILITY

The client is responsible for all activity originating from the account unless proven to be a victim of outside hacking or address forgery.

The client is responsible for securing their username/password.

Use of HostMe.co.nz service requires a certain level of knowledge in the use of Internet languages, protocols, and software. This level of knowledge varies depending on the anticipated use and desired content of the web space by the client. The following examples are offered: Web Publishing: requires knowledge of HTML, properly locating and linking documents, FTPing Web contents, Graphics, text, sound, image mapping, etc. FrontPage web publishing: knowledge of the FrontPage tools as well as Telnet and FTP understanding and capability. CGI-Scripts: requires a knowledge of the UNIX environment, TAR & GUNZIP commands, Perl, CShell scripts, permissions, etc. Mail: a use of mail clients to receive and send mail, etc. The client agrees that he or she has the necessary knowledge to create and maintain their web space.

Client agrees that it is not the responsibility of HostMe.co.nz to provide this knowledge.

BACKUPS

It is the clients’responsibility to maintain local copies of their website content. If loss of data occurs due to an error of HostMe.co.nz, HostMe.co.nz will attempt to recover the data at no charge to the client. If data loss occurs due to negligence of client in securing their account or by an action of the client, HostMe.co.nz will attempt to recover the data from the most recent archive for a NZ$30.00+GST fee.

IP NUMBERS

HostMe.co.nz maintains control of any and all I.P. numbers and addresses that may be assigned to the client and reserves in its sole discretion the right to change or remove any and all IP numbers and addresses.

MONEY BACK GUARANTEE

Regular Hosting Clients - Should you become unsatisfied with our services within the first 30 days of your account activation, HostMe.co.nz will refund your hosting fee.

Individual Reseller's and Bulk Reseller's - In the event that you become unsatisfied with our services within 30 days of your reseller account activation, only your initial account fees will be refunded. Once you have added a resold account to your Reseller Plan you will no longer qualify for the money back guarantee/refund. We can not be HELD LIABLE for any fees that you charge your clients.

HostMe.co.nz does not refund domain name registration fees.

LIMITATION OF LIABILITY

HostMe.co.nz shall not be responsible for any claimed damages, including incidental and consequential damages, which may arise from HostMe.co.nz servers going off-line or being unavailable for any reason whatsoever. Further, HostMe.co.nz shall not be responsible for any claimed damages, including incidental or consequential damages, resulting from the corruption or deletion of any web site from one of HostMe.co.nz servers.

HostMe.co.nz shall be the sole arbiter of what is and is not a violation of these acceptable use policies. HostMe.co.nz reserves the right to terminate an account at any time and for any reason. HostMe.co.nz reserves the right to delete all content and files upon termination. HostMe.co.nz reserves the right to withhold any pre-paid funds for any site removed for violations of these policies. HostMe.co.nz reserves the right to refuse, cancel, or suspend service at our sole discretion.

HostMe.co.nz reserves the right to change these Policies without prior notice or warning.

Non-enforcement of any part of these Policies does not constitute consent.

Violations of these Policies should be referred to abuse@websiteservices.co.nz

All complaints will be investigated promptly.

Last Updated: 28 May 2003.
Last Updated: 4th September 2008.