Terms Of Service

Account Setup
We will setup your account after we have received payment. Once our payment partner have screened the order in case of fraud. It is your responsibility to provide us with an email address which is not at the domain that you are signing up for. If there is a signup issue the primary email address that is on file will be used to contact you. It is your responsibility to ensure the email address is current and up to date. If you have a domain name registered with Hostcopper. It is your responsibility to ensure that the contact information for your domain account and your actual domain name info is correct and up to date. Hostcopper is not responsible for a lapsed registration due to outdated contact information associated with the domain. If you need to verify or change this information. You should contact us. Providing false contact information of any kind may result in the termination of your account. In dedicated server purchases or high risk transactions. It will be necessary to provide government issued identification and possibly a scan of the credit card used for the purchase. If you fail to meet these requirements. The order may be considered fraudulent in nature and be denied.

Transfers
Our domain transfer team will make every effort to move your website to us. However transfers are provided as courtesy. We can not make guarantees regarding the availability or time required to complete an account or website transfer. Each hosting company is setup differently and your site may not be possible to migrate.


Payment Information
You agree to supply appropriate payment for the services received from Hostcopper in advance of the time period during which such services are provided. You agree that unless you notify Hostcooper that you want to cancel you will contined to be billed on a recurring basis. This even includes when your hosting plan or plan is suspended. When your hosting plan or account is suspended and is past the 7 day grace period and you are wanting to resume services. Let us know so that your hosting plan or account may be charged for the current balance. Cancellations must be done in writing via the cancellation form provided. Once we receive your cancellation and have confirmed all necessary information with you via email. We will inform you via email that your account has been canceled. You should immediately receive an automatic email. A representative will process your request shortly thereafter. If you do not hear back from us or do not receive the automatic confirmation email within a few minutes after submitting your cancellation. Please contact us immediately via phone. We require that cancellations of service are done through the online form to confirm your identity and confirm in writing you are prepared for all files and emails to be removed and document the request. This process reduces the likelihood of mistakes fraudulent malicious requests and ensures you are aware that the files, emails, and account may be removed immediately after a cancellation request is processed. It is your responsibility to ensure that your payment information is up to date and that all invoices are paid on time. You agree that unless you notify Hostcopper that you want to cancel you will continue to be billed on a recurring basis. Hostcopper provides a 7 day grace period from the time the invoice is generated and when it must be paid. Any invoice that is outstanding for 7 days that is not paid will result in a $10 late fee and possible account suspension until account balance has been paid in full. The $10 late fee is applied in addition to whatever else is owed to Hostcopper for services rendered. Access to the account will not be restored until payment has been received. Invoices that have been paid more than once with multiple Paypal Subscriptions can only be added as credit towards the account and cannot be refunded via Paypal. If you require assistance please contact sales. Hostcopper has the right to change the monthly payment amount and any other charges at anytime.

Cancellations and Refunds
Hostcopper has the right to cancel, suspend, or otherwise restrict access to the account at any time with or without notice. Any TYPE of abuse of our staff will result in the suspension or termination of your services. Clients may cancel at anyime. Hostcopper gives you a 60 day money back guarantee on shared hosting and plans for any customer who paid the first invoice with a credit card or with Paypal. The following methods of payments are non refundable and refunds will be posted as credit to the hosting account:
- Money orders

There are no refunds on dedicated servers, administrative fees, install fees for custom software, or domain name purchases. Refund requests for shared and reseller accounts after the initial 45 days will be refunded on a prorated basis of any unused time. Only first-time accounts are eligible for a refund. For example, if you've had an account with us before, canceled 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.


Content
All services provided by Hostcopper may only be used for lawful purposes. The laws of the State of Texas and the United States of America laws apply. The customer agrees to indemnify and hold harmless Hostcopper 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. Any account found to be in violation of anothers copyright will be expeditiously removed or access to the material disabled. Any account found to be in repeated violation of copyright laws will be suspended or terminated from our hosting. If you believe that your copyright or trademark is being infringed upon please email abuse@hostcopper.com with the information. A list of required information may be found here. If the request is of a licensing issue, we may require further documentation.
Examples of unacceptable material on all Shared Hosting Plans include:
- Topsites
- IRC Scripts/Bots
- Proxy Scripts/Anonymizers
- Pirated Software/Warez
- Image Hosting Scripts (similar to Photobucket or Tinypic)
- AutoSurf/PTC/PTS/PPC sites
- IP Scanners
- Bruteforce Programs/Scripts/Applications
- Mail Bombers/Spam Scripts
- Banner-Ad services (commercial banner ad rotation)
- File Dump/Mirror Scripts (similar to rapidshare)
- Commercial Audio Streaming (more than one or two streams)
- Escrow/Bank Debentures
- High-Yield Interest Programs (HYIP) or Related Sites
- Investment Sites (FOREX, E-Gold Exchange, Second Life/Linden Exchange, Ponzi, MLM/Pyramid Scheme)
- Sale of any controlled substance without prior proof of appropriate permit(s)
- Prime Banks Programs
- Lottery Sites
- MUDs/RPGs/PBBGs
- Hateful/Racist/Harassment oriented sites
- Hacker focused sites/archives/programs
- Sites promoting illegal activities
- Forums and/or websites that distribute or link to warez/pirated/illegal content
- Bank Debentures/Bank Debenture Trading Programs
- Fraudulent Sites (Including, but not limited to sites listed at aa419.org & escrow-fraud.com)
- Mailer Pro
- Examples of unacceptable material on all Dedicated servers include:
- IRCD (irc servers)
- IRC Scripts/Bots
- Pirated Software/Warez
- IP Scanners
- Bruteforce Programs/Scripts/Applications
- Mail Bombers/spam Scripts
- Escrow
- High-Yield Interest Programs (HYIP) or Related Sites
- Investment Sites (FOREX, E-Gold Exchange, Second Life/Linden Exchange, Ponzi, MLM/Pyramid Scheme)
- Sale of any controlled substance without prior proof of appropriate permit
- Prime Banks Programs
- Lottery Sites
- Hateful/Racist/Harassment oriented sites
- Hacker focused sites/archives/programs
- Sites promoting illegal activities
- Forums and or websites that distribute or link to warez/pirated/illegal content
- Bank Debentures/Bank Debenture Trading Programs
- Fraudulent Sites

Hostcopper networks are provided only for authorized customer use. Hostcopper systems may be monitored for all purposes and management of the system for operational security. During monitoring information may be examined, recorded ,copied and used for authorized purposes. Hostcopper reserves the right to refuse service to anyone. Any material that is obscene and illegal or threating violates our terms of service in any manner may be removed from our servers with or without notice. Failure to respond to email our abuse department within 48 hours may result in the suspension or termination of your hosting plan or services. All abuse issues must be dealt via email at abuse@hostcopper.com You may contact abuse if in doubt that we can host your site.

Child Pornography
Any site found to host child pornography or linking to child pornography will be terminated immediately without notice.

Dedicated Servers: If found with child pornography. We will terminate the server and will notify you. Violations will be reported to the appropriate law enforcement agency.

Dedicated Server Security

It is your responsibility to ensure that scripts or programs installed under your account are secure and permissions of directories are set properly. You can set permissions on most directories to 755. Users are ultimately responsible for all actions taken under their hosting plan or account. This includes the compromise of credentials such as user name 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. We will notify you and allow time for you to update your password.

Zero Tolerance Spam Policy
We take a zero tolerance stance against sending of bulk emailing, unsolicited email, and spam. Safe lists and purchased lists will be treated as spam. Any user who sends out spam will have their account terminated with or without notice. Sites advertised via SPAM may not be hosted on our servers. This includes but is not limited to SPAM sent via fax, email, or newsgroups. Any hosting plan which results in a hostcopper IP being blacklisted will be immediately terminated or suspended. Hostcopper has the right to disable any web site, database, or other issue that does not comply that is service effecting. Hostcopper has the right to charge the client at sole discretion for cleaning up any email blacklists.

Limits
There is a 500 outgoing hourly email limit per domain. If you send over that amount within a hour emails will bounce back undeliverable.

Mailing Lists Rules
Any time you are sending a message no matter how large your email list it is a must. We recommend you throttle it to at the very least sending 1 email every 8 seconds. If you are using mailing list software that does not allow you to throttle you must switch to an application or script that will.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION: If you do not throttle and you try sending 500 emails. The server will try sending all 500 in 1 second which is not possible on our shared servers. This will cause a very high load on the server and the entire server will be sluggish and potentially affecting your sites and service and until this sending process is completed. It is our job to keep the server up and running without being sluggish or experiencing issues. Anyone who causes a server load to go high will be suspended and the process that is happening will be terminated. If you choose not to throttle it is highly likely that you will be suspended for crashing the server.
Any mailing list over 1000 email addresses can only be sent during off peak server times times to prevent high server loads. Off peak times qualify as all day Saturday and Sunday from 12AM - 8AM (CST) Central Standard Time.
The list must be a Double Opt-In list. This means a user has subscribed for a newsletter or other email marketing messages by explicitly requesting it and confirming the email address to be their own. Confirmation is usually done by responding to a notification/confirmation email sent to the email address the end user specified. The double opt-in method eliminates the chance of abuse where somebody submits someone else's email address without their knowledge and against their will. You will not be permitted to mail any mailing list that you were given or purchased. In doing so, this will also be considered spamming and may result in termination of the offending account.
Any unsolicited e-mail being sent will result in suspension or termination of the offending hosting plan. We take a zero tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited e-mail and other forms of spam. Any mailing list MUST comply with all guidelines set forth by the United States government. Rules can be found at: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm
No direct SMTP mailers are allowed. Any mail should be sent through the local mail server for further delivery by the server and not done directly by scripts.
Dedicated Mail Server Policy
The list must be a Double Opt-In list. This means a user has subscribed for a newsletter or other email marketing messages by explicitly requesting it and confirming the email address to be their own. Confirmation is usually done by responding to a notification or confirmation email sent to the email address the end user specified. The double opt-in method eliminates the chance of abuse where somebody submits someone elses email address without their knowledge and against their will. You are not be permitted to mail any mailing list that you were given or purchased. It will be considered spamming and may result in termination of the offending hosting plan.
Any unsolicited email being sent will result in suspension or termination of your hosting plan. We take zero tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited email and other forms of spam. Any mailling list MUST comply with all guidelines set forth by the United States government. Rules can be found at: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm


Backups and Data Loss
Use of this service is at your sole risk. Our backup service is run on Monday of each week, and provided to you as a courtesy. Hostcopper is not responsible for files and data residing on your account or hosting plan. You agree to take full responsibility for files and data transferred and to maintain all appropriate backup of files and data stored on Hostcopper servers. We do not guarantee backups in any form or fashion. In a event that your hosting account was suspended or terminated due to non-payment. You may contact us to see if there is a possible backup available.

Resource Usage
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) on shared servers.
- Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
- Run any bit torrent application, tracker, or client. You may link to legal torrents off-site, but may not host or store them on our shared servers.
- 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.
Users are strongly recommended to:
- 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")
- To help reduce usage, do not force html to handle server-side code (like php and shtml).
- Only use https protocol when necessary; encrypting and decrypting communications is noticeably more CPU-intensive than unencrypted communications.


INODES
The use of more than 250,000 inodes on any shared account may potentially result in a warning first. If no action is taken future suspension for accounts found to be exceeding the 100,000 inode limit will automatically be removed from our backup system to avoid over usage. However databases will still be backed up. Every file (a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode. Sites that slightly exceed our inode limits are not likely 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 and never checking their primary account mail box. 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 :fail: No such user here.

Backup Limit
Any shared account using more than 25 gigs of disk space will be removed from our weekly backup with the exception of databases continuing to be backed up. All data will continue to be mirrored to a secondary drive which helps protect data loss in the event of a drive failure.

Bandwidth Usage
You are allocated a monthly bandwidth allowance. This allowance varies depending on the hosting plan you purchase. Should your account pass the allocated amount we reserve the right to suspend the account until the start of the next allocation or suspend the account until more bandwidth is purchased at an additional fee. We may suspend the account until you upgrade to a higher level of package. We may also terminate the account and charge you an additional fee for the overages. Unused transfer in one month cannot be carried over to the next month.

Money back Guarantee
On dedicated servers no full refund will be honored. The 60 day money back guarantee does not apply. We reserve the right to refund a prorated amount or no refund at all. Hostcoppers shared hosting plans guarantee a 60 day money back guarantee. If you are not completely satisfied with our services within the first 60 days of your service. You will be given a full refund of the contract amount. This is only for shared hosting plans and does not apply to dedicated servers, administrative fees, install fees for custom software, or domain name purchases. Hostcopper will not activate new hosting plans or activate new packages for customers who have an outstanding balance. For a new order to be setup or a new package to be activated, you must have a balance of $0.00.

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 Hostcopper dependent upon justification provided. A third party monitoring service report may not be used for justification due to the monitors network capacity. The uptime of the server is defined as the reported uptime from the operating system and the server which may differ from the uptime reported by other individual services. To request a credit please contact sales. All requests must be made in writing via email to sales@hostcopper.com. Uptime guarantees only apply to shared hosting accounts. Dedicated servers are covered by a network guarantee in which the credit is prorated for the amount of time the server is down which is not related to our uptime guarantee.

Dedicated Servers
Hostcopper reserves the right to reset a password on a dedicated server if the password on file is not current so that we may do security audits. It is the responsibility of the client to ensure that there is a valid email address and current root password on file for their dedicated server on file to prevent downtime from forced password resets. Hostcopper reserves the right to audit servers as needed and to perform administrative actions. Dedicated servers 'are NOT backed' up by us and it is the responsibility of the client to maintain backups or have a solution for backing up their data. You can purchase an additional hard drive to maintain backups. Please contact sales if you wish to obtain a secondary hard drive. It is your responsibility to maintain backups.

Shared Hosting Accounts
Using a shared hosting account you may not resell web hosting in any form or fashion.

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

Disclaimer
Hostcopper will not be responsible for any damages your business may suffer. Hostcopper makes no warranties of any kind, expressed or implied for services we provide. Hostcopper disclaims any warranty or merchantability for a particular purpose. This includes loss of data resulting from delays, no deliveries, wrong delivery, for all service interruptions caused by Hostcopper and its employees.

Arbitration
By using any Hostcopper services you agree to submit to binding arbitration. If any disputes or claims arise against Hostcopper or its subsidiaries, such disputes will be handled by an arbitrator of Hostcopper.com choice. An arbitrator from the American Arbitration Association or the National Arbitration Forum will be selected in the state of Texas. 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. The Federal Arbitration Act, and not any state arbitration law governs all arbitration under this Arbitration Clause. You are also responsible for any and all costs related to such arbitration(s).

Disclosure to law enforcement
Hostcopper may disclose any subscriber information to law enforcement agencies without any further consent or notification to the subscriber upon lawful request from such law agencies. We will cooperate fully with law enforcement agencies.

Changes to the TOS
Hostcopper reserves the right to change the terms of service at anytime.