Web Hosting Terms of Service
All clients of Bad Dog Web Hosting & Design MUST AGREE to these Terms of Service in order to Host your site with us.
Terms of Service Last Updated: June 1, 2018 at 6:00am
Overview
This Hosting Agreement (this “Agreement”) is entered into by and between Bad Dog Web Hosting, an Indiana Limited Liability company ("Bad Dog Web Hosting") and you, and is made effective as of the date of electronic acceptance. This Agreement sets forth the terms and conditions of your use of Bad Dog Web Hosting’s Hosting services (the “Services”), and represents the entire agreement between you and Bad Dog Web Hosting concerning the subject matter hereof.
Your acceptance of this Agreement signifies that you have read, understand, acknowledge and agree to be bound by this Agreement.
The terms “we”, “us” or “our” shall refer to Bad Dog Web Hosting. The terms “you”, “your”, “User” or “customer” shall refer to any individual or entity who accepts this Agreement. Nothing in this Agreement shall be deemed to confer any third-party rights or benefits.
We may, in our sole and absolute discretion, change or modify this Agreement, any policies or agreements which are incorporated herein, and any limits or restrictions on the Services, at any time, and such changes or modifications shall be effective immediately upon written notification to you. Your use of the Services after such changes or modifications shall constitute your acceptance of this Agreement and any limitations to the Services as last revised. If you do not agree to be bound by this Agreement and any Service limitations as last revised, do not continue to use the Services. We may occasionally notify you of changes or modifications to this Agreement by email. It is therefore very important that you keep your email account information current. We assume no liability or responsibility for your failure to receive an email notification if such failure results from an inaccurate email address.
Financial Terms
Contract Term: The Customer agrees to a twelve (12) month contract, beginning upon commencement of service.
Charges: All normal charges for this contract are being donated to you with the understanding that a link and logo of Bad Dog Web Hosting will be placed within the border-plate of the website (Border-plate means the bottom of each page where the copyright information is presented).
Renewal: This agreement will automatically renew for successive twelve (12) month periods for the life of the contract until cancelled in writing.
Domain Names: The domain names (yourdomain.extension) are the property of the customer and beyond the control of Bad Dog Web Hosting.
Registrar Fees: The domain names (yourdomain.extension) have registrar fees that must be paid to the registrars by the Customer; Bad Dog Web Hosting is not responsible for the fees to the registrars.
Description of Services
We offer varying plans of Hosting Services:
Web Hosting. If you purchase Web Hosting, your site is placed within one or more servers and resources are shared between many customers on the same servers; however, your site is given a unique address (DNS).
WordPress Hosting. If you purchase WordPress Hosting, you get Web Hosting with the addition of WordPress software.
WordPress Security. WordPress like any software is vulnerable to attacks, flaws and code flaws; that being the case you are required to monthly install all WordPress Security Updates or Purchase a WordPress Maintenance Package from Bad Dog Web Hosting & Design.
WordPress Plugin Updates. WordPress Plugins like any software is vulnerable to attacks, flaws and code flaws; that being the case you are required to monthly install all WordPress Plugin Updates or Purchase a WordPress Maintenance Package from Bad Dog Web Hosting & Design.
WordPress Updates. You are required to keep WordPress on the Latest version of WordPress to secure your WordPress site or Purchase a WordPress Maintenance Package from Bad Dog Web Hosting & Design. Not doing so could open your site up to security attacks and thus our server to security attacks.
You are solely responsible for reviewing the functionality and accuracy of migrated content in its new location following a Hosting Migration. If you are satisfied with the data migration, you will need to update the DNS record for the domain name in order to publish the website in its new location. We will perform website backups nightly of our entire server and all web site content.
Limitations; Account Termination
Migration of Servers. You acknowledge and agree that as a normal course of business, it may be necessary for us to migrate our servers. As a result, even if you have a dedicated IP, you may be assigned a different IP number. We do not warrant that you will be able to consistently maintain your given IP numbers.
Termination of Services. This Agreement may be terminated by either party, without cause, by giving the other party 90 days written notice. Notice must be made by mail or electronic mail. Bad Dog Web Hosting will not accept terminations over the telephone. Notwithstanding the above, Bad Dog Web Hosting may terminate service under this Agreement at any time, without penalty, if the Customer fails to comply with the terms of this Agreement, including non-payment. Bad Dog Web Hosting reserves the right to charge a reinstatement fee.
Content Ownership. You maintain ownership of all content of your site. Upon termination of the Services, Bad Dog Web Hosting will assist you in taking a copy of all of your content to your new hosting facility if you request our assistance. Bad Dog Web Hosting does not claim any ownership to your content.
Your Obligations
Justification. You acknowledge and agree that we shall have the right to seek justification in connection with your use of the Services, specifically your purchase of IP addresses, and you shall be obligated to provide any and all information reasonably sought by us pursuant to such justification. In connection with such purchase, you acknowledge and agree that your name and justification may be disclosed to certain registries including, but not limited to, the American Registry of Internet Numbers, in accordance with policies promulgated by any and all such registries and such information may be displayed publicly on the Whois database.
Abusive Activities. You acknowledge and agree that you may not use our servers and your website as a source, intermediary, reply to address, or destination address for mail bombs, Internet packet flooding, packet corruption, denial of service, or other abusive activities. Server hacking or other perpetration of security breaches is prohibited and we reserve the right to remove sites containing information about hacking or links to such information. Use of your website as an anonymous gateway is prohibited. We prohibit the use of software or scripts run on our servers that cause the server to load beyond a reasonable level, as determined by us. You agree that we reserve the right to remove your website temporarily or permanently from our servers if you are in violation of this Agreement and/or there are activities that threaten the stability of our network. You acknowledge and agree that all websites associated with your hosting account may be removed if one website is in violation of this Agreement. In addition to the General Rules of Conduct listed in our Universal Terms of Service, you agree not to engage in unacceptable use of the Services, which includes, without limitation, use of the Services to: (1) disseminate or transmit any material that, to a reasonable person may be grossly offensive, vulgar or malicious; (2) attempt to mislead any person as to the identity, source or origin of any communication; (3) interfere, disrupt or attempt to gain unauthorized access to any computer system, server, network or account for which you do not have authorization to access or at a level exceeding your authorization; (4) engage in any other activity deemed by us to be in conflict with the spirit or intent of this Agreement or any of our policies; or (5) use your server as an “open relay” or for similar purposes.
We prohibit the running of a public recursive DNS service on any of our servers. All recursive DNS servers must be secured to allow only internal network access or a limited set of IP addresses. We actively scan for the presence of public DNS services and reserve the right to remove any servers from the network that violate this restriction.
Storage and Security. You shall be solely responsible for undertaking measures to:
- prevent any loss or damage to your website or server content;
- maintain independent archival and backup copies of your website or server content; and
- ensure the security, confidentiality and integrity of all your website or server content transmitted through or stored on our servers.
Our servers are not an archive and we shall have no liability to you or any other person for loss, damage or destruction of any of your content. The Services are not intended to provide a PCI (Payment Card Industry) or HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant environment and therefore should not be used or considered as one. You shall not use the Service in any way, in our sole discretion, that shall impair the functioning or operation of our services or equipment. Specifically, by way of example and not as a limitation, you shall not use the Services as:
- a repository or instrument for placing or storing archived files; and/or
- placing or storing material that can be downloaded through other websites.
You acknowledge and agree that we have the right to carry out a forensic examination in the event of a compromise to your server or account.
Website/Server Content. You shall be solely responsible for providing, updating, uploading and maintaining your website or server and any and all files, pages, data, works, information and/or materials on, within, displayed, linked or transmitted to, from or through your website or server including, but not limited to, trade or service marks, images, photographs, illustrations, graphics, audio clips, video clips, email or other messages, meta tags, domain names, software and text. You acknowledge and agree that in the course of providing you with technical assistance, it may be necessary for our support staff to modify, alter or remove the content of your hosted product. Your website or server content shall also include any registered domain names provided by you or registered on behalf of you in connection with the Services.
Provisions Specific to Web and WordPress Hosting
Storage and Plan Limits. All Web Hosting and WordPress Hosting plans, including the unlimited plans, are subject to a limit of no more than 250,000 inodes per account. The plans are also limited to no more than 1,000 tables per database and no more than one gigabyte of storage per database. Any account or database that exceeds these limits may be issued a network violation warning and will be required to reduce the number of inodes, files and folders, tables or gigabytes (as the case may be), or may be temporarily or permanently suspended, in our sole discretion. All Linux hosting plans are subject to the following limitations: no more than a) 25% of one CPU core; b) 512MB of RAM; c) 100 website connections; d) 100 active processes; e) 1 MB/s disk IO. In the event these limitations are exceeded, your site may slow down or not be served until more resources are added. More resources may be added for additional fees.
WordPress Hosting may only be used to host a WordPress website. Only a single WordPress installation is allowed per website. Any WordPress hosting account found to be hosting a non-WordPress website may be issued a network violation warning and will be required to remove the non-WordPress website, or may be temporarily or permanently suspended, in our sole discretion. Additionally, you may be required to purchase an appropriate hosting plan in order to host the non-WordPress site should you wish to continue hosting the non-WordPress site on our network.
Website/Server Content. Your website may not include any of the following content:
- image hosting scripts that allow an anonymous user to upload an image for display on another website (similar to Photobucket or Tinypic);
- file dump/mirror scripts that allow an anonymous user to upload a file for other to download (similar to rapidshare);
- commercial audio streaming (more than one or two streams);
- push button mail scripts that allow the user to specify recipient email addresses;
- anonymous or bulk SMS gateways;
- backups of content from another computer or website;
- Bittorrent trackers; or
- any script that causes a degradation in the performance of our server or network environment.
Service Up-time Guarantee
We offer a Service up-time guarantee of 99.9% (“Service Up-time Guarantee”) of available time per month. If we fail to maintain this Service Up-time Guarantee in a particular month (as solely determined by us), you may contact us and request a credit of 5% of your monthly hosting fee for that month. The credit may be used only for the purchase of further products and services from us, and is exclusive of any applicable taxes. The Service Up-time Guarantee does not apply to service interruptions caused by:
- periodic scheduled maintenance or repairs we may undertake from time to time;
- interruptions caused by you from custom scripting, coding or the installation of third-party applications;
- outages that do not affect the appearance of your website but merely affect access to your website such as FTP and email;
- causes beyond our control or that are not reasonably foreseeable; and
- outages related to the reliability of certain programming environments.
Third Party Software
Definition. “Third Party Software” means any software or application developed and owned by a third party provider that we may contract with from time to time.
Operating Software. The Services are operated in Linux® environments. Each time you commission a server, we will provision the server with the operating system you choose.
We reserve the right to modify, change, or discontinue any Third-Party Software at any time, and you agree to cooperate in performing such steps as may be necessary to install any updates to the Third-Party Software. The Third-Party Software is neither sold nor distributed to you, and you may use the Third-Party Software solely as part of the Services. You may not use the Third-Party Software outside of the Services. We may provide your personal information to third-party providers as required to provide the Third-Party Software. You acknowledge and agree that your use of the Third-Party Software is subject to our agreement(s) with the third-party providers. In addition, if the Third-Party Software is accompanied by or requires consent to a service or license agreement from the third-party provider, your use of the Third-Party Software is subject to such service or license agreement. You may not download, install, or use any Third-Party Software that is accompanied by or requires consent to a service or license agreement from a third-party provider unless you first agree to the terms and conditions of such service or license agreement. You may not remove, modify, or obscure any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary rights notices that are contained in or on the Third-Party Software. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Third-Party Software, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law. You acknowledge and agree that the third-party providers (and their affiliates and suppliers) make no representations or warranties about any Third-Party Software offered in connection with the Services, and expressly disclaim any liability or damages (whether direct, indirect, or consequential) arising from the use of the Third-Party Software. You acknowledge and agree that any Third-Party Software will be supported by us and not by the third-party providers (or their affiliates or suppliers).
Limited Liability
The Customer expressly agrees that use of Bad Dog Web Hosting's Server is at the Customer's sole risk. Neither Bad Dog Web Hosting, nor its employees, affiliates, agents, third party information providers, merchants licensers or the like, warrant that Bad Dog Web Hosting's Server service will not be interrupted or error free; nor do they make any warranty as to the results that may be obtained from the use of the Server service or as to the accuracy, reliability or content of any information service or merchandise contained in or provided through the Bad Dog Web Hosting Server service, unless otherwise expressly stated in this Agreement.
Under no circumstances, including negligence, shall Bad Dog Web Hosting, its officers, agents or anyone else involved in creating, producing or distributing Bad Dog Web Hosting’s Server service be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages that result from the use of or inability to use the Bad Dog Web Hosting Server service; or that results from mistakes, omissions, interruptions, deletion of files, errors, defects, delays in operation, or transmission or any failure of performance, whether or not limited to acts of God, communication failure, theft, destruction or unauthorized access to Bad Dog Web Hosting’s records, programs or services. The Customer hereby acknowledges that this paragraph shall apply to all content on Bad Dog Web Hosting’s Server service.
Notwithstanding the above, the Customer's exclusive remedies for all damages, losses and causes of actions whether in contract, tort including negligence or otherwise, shall not exceed the aggregate dollar amount which the Customer paid during the term of this Agreement and any reasonable attorney's fee and court costs.
Lawful Purpose
You may only use Bad Dog Web Hosting’s Server for lawful purpose. Transmission of any material in violation of any Federal, State or Local regulation is prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to copyrighted material, material legally judged to be threatening or obscene, pornographic, profane, or material protected by trade secrets. This also includes links or any connection to such materials.
Indemnification
You agree that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold Bad Dog Web Hosting harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and claims, including reasonable attorneys' fees, ("Liabilities") asserted against Bad Dog Web Hosting, its agents, its customers, servants officers and employees, that may arise or result from any service provided or performed or agreed to be performed or any product sold by the Customer, its agents, employees or assigns. The Customer agrees to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Bad Dog Web Hosting against Liabilities arising out of
- any injury to person or property caused by any products sold or otherwise distributed in connection with Bad Dog Web Hosting’s Server;
- any material supplied by the Customer infringing or allegedly infringing on the proprietary rights of a third party;
- copyright infringement and
any defective product which the Customer sold on the Bad Dog Web Hosting Server.