Terms of Service

This document describes the service that is offered, charges for the services and actions that are prohibited.

The Provider

Virtual Servers hosting service is operated by VPS Networks, a Cape Town, South Africa registered CC and will be referred as ’the Provider’.

Software license and rights

If and to the extent that you require use of the Provider’s software in order to use the Services, the Provider grants to you a royalty-free, world-wide, non-transferable, non-exclusive license to use the Provider’s software in object code form only. You have the right to authorize your employees, agents and third party consultants and contractors to use the Provider’s software as aforesaid provided that such use is consistent with the terms of this agreement.

You grant to the Provider a royalty-free, worldwide, non-exclusive license to use all text, graphics, logos, photographs, images, moving images, sound, illustrations and other material and related documentation featured, displayed or used in or in relation to your Website and all associated software (’Content’) so far as is necessary in order for the Provider to provide the Services.

Save as expressly set out herein, this agreement does not:

You agree that you will not for yourself, or through any parent, subsidiary, affiliate, agent or other third party:

IP addresses

You acknowledge that you have no right, title or interest in the IP address allocated to you, and that any IP address allocated to you is allocated as part of the services and is not portable or otherwise transferable by you in any manner whatsoever. If an IP address is renumbered or reallocated by the Provider, the Provider shall use his reasonable endeavors to avoid any disruption to you.

You agree that you will have no right, title or interest to the IP address upon termination of this agreement, and that the acquisition by you of a new IP address for your VPS following termination of this agreement shall be your exclusive responsibility.

The Service

The Customer may terminate the service at any time with at least two days notice prior to your contract renewal date by issuing a cancellation request via your Client Portal. All cancellations are processed in at most 24 hours. Refunds will generally not be issued, unless the Provider considers that there are appropriate grounds for the request. The Provider does not offer refunds on any products under any circumstances. If applicable refunds will only be issued for the previous one month of service and exclude any control panel licensing fees.

The virtual private servers are offered as unmanaged service. The Provider obligations are limited to offering you the virtual private server access and will not configure, secure or do any software configuration on your virtual private server. Support is not offered for any software that will be offered by the Provider, nor for any software that you may install.

Should any part of your account be overdue the Provider reserve the right to suspend or cancel all services associated with your account.

Your contract with the Provider last and renews for the length of you billing period. For example if you pay every month then your contract is for one (1) month. If you pay every three (3) months, your contact lasts 3 months and so on. Should payment be late by greater than eight (8) days we reserve the right to levy a late fee on your account of R10.00 or 10% whichever is higher. Beyond seven (7) days late we will suspend your virtual server. After fourteen (14) days your virtual server will be terminated.

For the purposes of this agreement ’Downtime’ means any service interruption of one minute or more in the availability to visitors of the Website pursuant to the Services, but only if the interruption is due to a default by the Provider resulting in power, network or hardware failure, but excluding software issues.

Outages, including emergency and previously scheduled windows for router, switch or server maintenance, are not to be included in downtime calculations. The Provider shall make all commercially reasonable efforts to provide you with previous email notification of all scheduled and emergency outages.

The Provider shall notify you of any report of Downtime, and investigate it using suitably qualified personnel, as soon as reasonably practicable after becoming aware of it, and shall remedy the downtime as soon as reasonably practicable.

Backups

The Provider does not make any backups of the customers’ data unless specifically opted for under an additional paid for service. It is your responsibility, as a customer, to backup your data. The Provider does not accept any liability for any of your data whether being lost due to your failure to backup your data. This includes the event of hardware failures or any other reason for data being lost.

Service Level Agreement

The Provider provides customers with 99.9% uptime excluding planned maintenance. Uptime is considered to be when the server you are hosted on is accessible via IP address. This Service Level Agreement (SLA) does not cover downtime due to mistakes on the client behalf or due to account being suspended. In the event that this SLA is breached the Provider will refund up to 50% of the monthly fees at a rate of 10% of monthly fee for every 1% of downtime below 99.9%. Refund requests must be received by ticket within two days of the downtime.

Acceptable Use Policy

The Customer shall not use the services or the servers provided by the Provider to:

  1. send unsolicited commercial or bulk email to any party for any reason which may or may not result in a complaint
  2. access or attempt to access a computer or network resource that you are not authorized to access.
  3. distribute or make available in any way to any party intellectual property that requires some method of authorization to sell or distribute, which you do not have.
  4. store, transmit, create, or examine any pictures, realistic or not, of humans, or images suggesting humans that are under the age of 18 years in an either implied or actual pornographic picture.
  5. forge email headers or TCP/IP packet headers or engage in spoofing.
  6. distribute worms, viruses, or Trojans
  7. violate export controls on any software or intellectual property.
  8. IRC access is forbidden
  9. store and/or transmit video and audio except for personal video and personal or free audio
  10. commit or attempt to commit any denial of service attack against any computer, network, or individual.
  11. war bots/X-DCC are not allowed
  12. shell hosting companies cannot be run from our service
  13. use any peer to peer programs.
  14. if you are (D)DOSsed the Provider reserve the right to suspend your account to limit the attack. If you are found to have caused the (D)DOS your account may be suspended or cancelled and you billed.
  15. abuse towards the Provider’s staff in the form of verbal abuse or anything else that we deem to be offensive may result in cancellation of your account
  16. no free hosting companies are allowed on our service due to the high risk of abuse by end clients
  17. game servers such as Half Life 2 or CounterStrike and similar are not allowed due to the amount of CPU resources they take
  18. proxies are tolerated but should they cause issue the supplier has the right to suspend them and inform the client they need to upgrade or move the proxy

The Provider does not monitor, and will have no liability for the contents of, any communications transmitted by virtue of the services. Notwithstanding the aforesaid the Provider reserves the right to withdraw the service without compensation to the Customer in the event of a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy and any such breach shall be treated as a fundamental breach of contract.

Privacy Policy

The Provider respects the privacy of every individual who is our customer, visits our web sites, responds to our interactive advertisements or sends us e-mail. The information that we collect will be used according to the law. We may collect your information for processing your order, providing you the service or to improve our service.

Provider will not share the customers and web site visitors data with any third party.

Termination

The Provider reserves the right to terminate your account, and any future business relation with you, for any suitable reason at any time via email notification.

Force Majeure

The Provider will not be liable for delays in its performance of the Terms and Conditions or the Provider services caused by circumstances beyond the Provider’ reasonable control, including acts of God, wars, insurrection, civil commotions, riots, national disasters, earthquakes, strikes, fires, floods, water damage, explosions, shortages of labor or materials, labor disputes, transportation problems, accidents, embargoes, or governmental restrictions (collectively ’Force Majeure’). The Provider will make reasonable efforts to reduce to a minimum and mitigate the effect of any Force Majeure. Notwithstanding anything contained elsewhere herein, lack of finances will not be considered an event of Force Majeure nor will any event of Force Majeure suspend any obligation of customers for the payment of money due. Any waiver, modification, or amendment of any provision of the Terms and Conditions or other agreement for the Provider services, initiated by a customer, will be effective only if accepted in writing and signed by an authorized representative of the Provider.

Governing Law and Severability

The Terms and Conditions, and any other agreement for the Provider services, will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of South Africa without reference to its conflicts of laws principles. Any litigation or arbitration between a customer and the Provider will take place in South Africa, and the customer will consent to personal jurisdiction and venue in that jurisdiction. If any provision or portion of the Terms and Conditions or other the Provider agreement is found by a court of competent jurisdiction to be unenforceable for any reason, the remainder of the Terms and Conditions or the agreement will continue in full force and effect.

Exclusion of third party rights

The Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 shall not apply to this agreement (Terms and Conditions) and no person other than the parties to this agreement shall have any rights under it, nor shall it be enforceable under that Act by any person other than the parties.