General
Hostking provides hosting services to clients worldwide, and we have a responsibility to protect each client and to provide the best services available. All registered clients of Hostking (hostking.co.za) agree to and are subject to our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and the following Acceptable Use Policy: All services provided by Hostking may be used for lawful purposes only. Transmission, storage, or presentation of any information, data or material in violation of any South African State or City law is prohibited. Services provided by Hostking that reside outside of the South Africa must still abide these terms and must not be in violation of any relevant laws of hosting city, state and country. This includes, but is not limited to: copyrighted material, material we judge to be threatening or obscene, or material protected by trade secret and other statute. The subscriber agrees to indemnify and hold harmless Hostking and its employees from any claims resulting from the use of the service which damages the subscriber or any other party. The provisions of this AUP are intended as guidelines and are not meant to be exhaustive. Generally, conduct that violates law, regulation, or the accepted norms of the Internet community, whether or not expressly mentioned in this AUP, are prohibited. We reserve the right at all times to prohibit activities that damage our or our affiliates’ commercial reputation and goodwill. We will be the sole and final arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of our policies.Spam
All users must comply with all relevant legislation and regulations on bulk and commercial e-mail, including but not limited to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Users may not send mass unsolicited e-mail, which is email that is sent to recipients who have not “opted-in” to mailings from the user. Users who send mass mailings must maintain complete and accurate records of all consents and opt-ins and provide such records to Hostking upon its request. If a user cannot provide positive and verifiable proof of such consents and opt-ins, we will consider the mass mailing to be unsolicited. Users are prohibited from operating mailing lists, listservs, or mailing services that do not target an audience that has voluntarily signed up for e-mail information using an “opt-in” process or that has made their e-mail addresses available to a user for distribution of information. Users who operate mailing lists must maintain complete and accurate records of all consents and “opt-in” elections and provide such records to Hostking upon its request. If a user cannot provide positive and verifiable proof of such consents and “opt-in” elections, we will consider the list mailing to be unsolicited. Any user-maintained mailing list must also allow any party on the list to remove itself automatically and permanently. Other prohibited activities include, without limitation, the following: Use of our network for the receipt of replies to unsolicited mass e-mail. Forgery of e-mail headers (spoofing); Spamming via third-party proxy, aggregation of proxy lists, or installation of proxy mailing software. Configuration of a mail server to accept and process third-party messages for sending without user identification and authentication. Hosting web pages advertised within “spam e-mail” sent from another network (spamvertising). Hosting web pages or providing services that support spam. Any other unsolicited bulk messages, postings, or transmissions through media such as weblog posts, IRC/chat room messages, guestbook entries, HTTP referrer log entries, usenet posts, pop-up messages, instant messages, or SMS messages. Instructing others in any activity prohibited by this AUP. If, as a result of your actions, our domains and/or IP address ranges are placed on black hole lists or other mail filtering software systems, your server may be suspended and possibly terminated upon further investigation.Prohibited Uses
The following uses are prohibited on our network. Engaging in these activities on our services will result in an account and/or service suspension without notice.
Copyrighted content hosting and/or linking to pirated content
Open proxies
Stressers/booter websites
Mail/SMS bombers
Mass mail
IP spoofing
Network/port Scanning
Distribution of credentials and/or personal information
Denial of Service (D)DoS attacks
TOR exit nodes
Open DNS resolvers
Hola
Kloxo
Virtual currency (*coin) mining
World Community Grid, Folding at Home, or similar software
CrystalMines
HitLeap or any artificial traffic creation
HYIP websites
iBusinessPromoter or similar
software Vulnerability scanning
Bruteforcing
Social media crawlers
Cracking
Botnets
Pornography
Hivemail
Telnet or SSH access scripts
Usenet
Destructive activities including but not limited to phishing, malware and/or distributing malicious content
Illegal activities including but not limited to ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, phishing, scam websites and pirating software
Video streaming
Content delivery networks (CDN)
LIULIANGKUANG
Multics, CCcam, or any other card sharing software
Chinese private games servers and related websites
Any form of file hosting, file storage, cyberlocker, leeching or similar activity is prohibited
Some network ports are blocked on our network, this is to ensure our services are not used maliciously and to protect machines from possible known vulnerabilities. Any port(s) may be added or removed to/from the list of blocks without prior notice to users. Please create a support ticket if you require more information on the specific blocks.
Overages
Please note if you do not stay within the bounds of your plan you can receive an overage bill. We reserve the right and without notification to charge for such overages. You may query this with support department at any time. VPS : If you so choose VPS Servers that exceed Bandwidth will be auto-suspended, (Note: it is Unmanaged VPS customers responsibility to keep their VPS servers secure and passwords secure)DDoS Attacks
Users who are targeted with frequent and/or disruptive attacks may have action taken against their service and/or account. If your service(s) are found to be impacting the experience of other users persistently, you will be notified via ticket and requested to prevent further damages from occurring or relocate to another provider.Fair Usage
Unlimited & unmetered claims have software and hardware limitations, and are subject to a discretionary fair use policy by our team. Our hosting plans are intended only to be used for content relevant to a hosted website, any form of backup storage, file locker services, personal media (e.g. photos, movies, music or any other form of media) is not permitted. If you are using more of any resource than is considered realistic or reasonable for the relevant platform then you will be notified via ticket to reduce your usage. If any user’ usage of a resource imposes a risk to the integrity of the platform, they may have their service(s) suspended to prevent any disruptions.Web Hosting+
All accounts are protected by CloudLinux virtualization. The resources allocated to our clients through packages are not dedicated to the account, and no right to use the entirety of any resource is given. These are in place to lessen attack disruption and/or abusive behavior from affecting other customers on the same node. If you are persistently reaching these limits, we may request that you upgrade your plan (if applicable) or move to a more powerful environment such as a VPS or dedicated server. We retain the right to change these limits without notice and to suspend service(s) that are persistently reaching their resource limits. Outgoing mail on all of our Directadmin and cPanel host nodes are limited to 500 emails per hour on each individual account, this includes mailman lists and PHP mail. We retain the right to alter this limit without prior notice. SSH access granted by Hostking is jailed by CloudLinux LVE to prevent access to unauthorized directories/binaries and damages to the host node. If you are found to be installing or running processes that are not meant for the platform you’re placed on, those processes will be killed and your SSH access will be revoked. Severe and/or persistent abuse may result in an account suspension.Backup policy
All Directadmin and cPanel host nodes run daily backups of accounts, the maximum retain period is 14 days. This process happens during off-peak hours and may cause a decrease in server performance during this time, we are not responsible for any performance decrease during the process. Accounts using more than 200GB quota and/or 300,000 files are excluded from the backup process to ensure tasks are completed in a timely manner without hindering performance. We provide these backups as an emergency fail-safe and cannot guarantee their availability to users. For shared & reseller accounts, backups older than 14 days in a user account may be removed from the server at our discretion. You agree that we may remove impermissible data from our servers at any time in our sole discretion without notice. We may also delete the following types of files if we find them to be using excessive amounts of disk space, especially if affecting other users:
Direct Admin or other backups stored locally.
Softaculous backups stored locally.
Softaculous backup temp files.
Common CMS backups stored locally.
Common CMS backup temp files.
Common CMS backup logs.
Excessively sized error logs.
Any other large files deemed unnecessary for core website functionality or not containing any valuable data.
VPS+
On our VPS platform, CPU, network and disk I/O are shared among other users on the same node. If your VPS is persistently using these resource(s) for a prolonged period of time and/or disrupting the experience of other users sharing the same node, we will notify you to reduce your usage via ticket. Severe cases may result in your VPS being rebooted, shutdown, moved to a different node(migrated) and/or suspended. Failure to acknowledge an abuse ticket will result in a suspension of your VPS.Backups
We perform weekly full backups of VPS servers for disaster recovery purposes. Backups are usually performed during weekends. We can restore these upon your request at no charge to retrieve data etc. as required. Customers are responsible on deciding if they will be offering their customers daily backups which must be set within their VPS panels, etc.VPS Technical Support
As all VPS plans are unmanaged, we will only directly assist when the following are negatively affected for a user/server:
Proxmox/SolusVM Issues
Network Connectivity
OS Template/ISO Issues
Server Hardware
Questioned Uses
The following are acceptable providing they abide with the rest of this policy:
IRC*
Game servers**
Desktops environments**
VPN servers
Torrenting (You must limit your client/seeder to 20Mbps)