Terms of Service

We've recently rewritten our Terms of Service to be more friendly and understandable. The last thing we want is to be imposing rules on our customers which aren't clear. We believe that if you're fair with us then we should be fair with you.

However, we all need rules to follow so that both sides understand their responsibilities. Please take the time to look over our Terms of Service below. We'll always attempt to inform our active customers of any changes to these, although this may not always be possible. We reserve the right to change these Terms of Service as often as we feel necessary.

All sections of our Terms of Service apply to all customers, regardless of what current or future services you may have with us. Our Terms of Service are categorised into the following sections as follows:

1. Billing & Payments

  • 1.1 Currently we only accept payments via PayPal. We cannot be held responsible if you are unable to make a payment via PayPal for any of your services with us, or the consequences which may arise from late or non-payment (such as suspension and/or cancellation of services/accounts).
  • 1.2 If you are having any difficulties (or foresee any future difficulties) regarding making a payment for your services, please let us know as soon as possible. Most of the time we may be able to make special arrangements to prevent the temporary suspension of your services, although this is not guaranteed. Either way, feel free to enquire if this is the case.
  • 1.3 We can refund any unused hosting time in full months only, for example, if you purchased 12 months of hosting, and then decided to cancel halfway through month 6, we would refund the remaining 5 full months of hosting back to you, as a calculated percentage of what you originally paid. This only applies for hosting accounts which are purchased in quantities of two months or more in advance.
  • 1.4 For hosting accounts which are under 14 days old, you can request the full amount back if you're not completely satisfied under our Hosting Money Back Guarantee. Point 1.3 above will then apply after 14 days time.
  • 1.5 Unfortunately we cannot under any circumstances provide a refund for domain name services whatsoever. Please ensure all domain names you purchase are spelt correctly before checking out. If you attempt to force a chargeback against us via PayPal for any domain name related purchases (new registrations and/or renewals), then we reserve the right to suspend and/or cancel all of your services held with us. This isn't designed to be unfair, but we ourselves cannot reclaim for incorrect or invalid domain name registrations.

2. Fair Usage of Services

  • 2.1 Any shared hosting accounts which start using more server resources than acceptable, or start to cause problems for other customers and accounts on the same server, will have to have alternate hosting arrangements put in place. This would usually be resolved by relocating the shared hosting account to a more capable virtual private server, or in extreme cases a dedicated server of its own. This may or may not end up being provided by us. We will try our hardest to relocate any rapidly growing shared hosting accounts to a more suitable platform with as minimal amount of downtime as possible. The majority of small websites hosted on a shared hosting package will probably never need to take this step, for example, small personal websites sites.

3. Web Hosting Specific Terms of Service

  • 3.1 We are not prepared to host anything of an illegal nature on our shared hosting servers. This includes (but is not limited to) pornograpic material of any kind, warez or hacking information and/or software/tools, any content which the account owner does not have permission from the copyright owner to use, IRC daemons, bots, or any other type of continuous server-side processes. We will decide what is and isn't acceptable to be hosted on our shared hosting servers. We can be more lenient on what can be hosted on a dedicated server maintained by us, however, we still reserve the right to decide what is and isn't acceptable. We advise you to speak to us before ordering a hosting package, VPS or dedicated server to ensure your website's content is acceptable. Common sense prevails here as expected.
  • 3.2 If we are asked or forced to remove certain content and/or files from a website and/or hosting account/server, we may have no option but to do this. We can be made to remove content and/or files by either law enforcement agencies, the Police, the Government, or copyright owners of content you may be hosting. We will always fight the corner of our customers as far as we can, but we may not always be able to allow you to continue hosting certain types of content and/or files if requested for them to be removed by parties involved.
  • 3.3 Although we strive to ensure our servers are available around the clock, there may be times when due to factors either within or our of our control this isn't possible. We aim to provide 99.7% uptime per month on our shared hosting servers. This may not be the case on any dedicated servers or VPS packages which we offer. We cannot be held responsible if you cannot access data on our servers for any reason at any time, and we cannot offer refunds due to downtime (although this does not affect points 1.3 & 1.4 of these Terms of Service.
  • 3.4 We and our third party providers try our best to look after your data, but we cannot be held responsible for any data which may be lost or corrupted whilst using our services. Please ensure that you keep offline backups of everything you upload to our servers!

4. Domain Name Specific Terms of Service

  • 4.1 When you register or transfer a domain name to Hartserver, you remain the full, legal owner of it. We only manage the infrastructure. This leaves you free to move your domain name to another provider at any time, free of charge, for any reason. Please be aware that there may be a transfer in fee at another domain name providers end which we can do nothing about.
  • 4.2 You may have to pay a transfer in fee to us when moving a domain name to us from another provider. We will always state what this is. In most cases however, when you have to pay a transfer in fee, you will probably receive an additional year of registration on the domain name you are transferring in to us. We will also make this clear at the time you transfer the domain name in to us.

5. Your Privacy

We care about the privacy of our customers. Our Privacy Policy is explained separately at http://www.hartserver.net/privacy/

If you have any queries or suggestions whatsoever concerning our Terms of Service, please let us know.

These Terms of Service were last updated: 27th October 2009 01:19