SPHERE WEB HOSTING, LLC. ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY (AUP)

This AUP is incorporated by reference in the Terms of Service. Terms used in this AUP shall have the same meaning given in the Terms of Service.

Sphere strives to maintain a high-level of service, and a lot of customers depend on our high standards of quality. The provisions of this section 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 here, are prohibited.

Email Limits for Shared Hosting Accounts
For Enterprise Email Accounts, please review our Enterprise Email Terms of Service. The following limits apply to all Shared Hosting Accounts. An account constitutes one control panel.

  • Shared Hosting Accounts may send up to 500 emails per hour.
  • Mailing list larger than 500 have to be sent during off-peak hours. Contact our Support Department for those hours.
  • Mailing lists larger than 3500 are not allowed in a shared environment. Dividing one large list into smaller lists is not allowed.
  • You must throttle all sending of mailing lists, regardless of size, to 1 email every 8 seconds or longer to stay below the 500 per hour outgoing email limit. If your mailing list program does not include this feature, You must change to one that does. We recommend PHPList.
  • No Direct SMTP mailers are allowed. One example of this is DarkMailer.
  • All email is required to be sent through our email servers, using SMTP Authentication, for further delivery and not sent directly by scripts.
  • No POP/IMAP checks more frequently than 1 every 5 minutes per mailbox.

Bulk Email and Mailing Lists for All Account Holders
We do not tolerate sending of unsolicited email, commonly known as spam. If You send bulk email that does not comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and other laws and regulations applicable to bulk or commercial email, and meet the following requirements, it will be considered spam and prohibited:

  • your mailing list cannot be one purchased, prepared by a third party or given to You. This will be considered spam because the recipients did not agree to receive email from You.
  • your intended recipients have given their consent to receive email from You via some affirmative means, such as an opt-in procedure;
  • your procedures for seeking consent include reasonable means to ensure that the person giving consent is the owner of the email address for which consent is given;
  • You retain evidence of each recipient's consent in a form that can be promptly produced on request, and You honor recipient's and Sphere Web Hosting's requests to produce consent evidence within 48 hours of receipt of the request;
  • You have procedures in place that allow a recipient to revoke their consent - such as a link in the body of the email, or instructions to reply with the word "Remove" in the subject line; You honor revocations of consent within 48 hours, and You notify recipients that the revocation of their consent will be implemented in 48 hours;
  • You must post an email address for complaints (such as abuse@[yourdoman.com]) in a conspicuous place on any website associated with the email, You must register that address at abuse.net, and You must promptly respond to messages sent to that address;
  • You must have a Privacy Policy posted for each domain associated with the mailing;
  • You have the means to track anonymous complaints;
  • You may not obscure the source of your email in any manner, such as omitting, forging, or misrepresenting message headers or return addresses. Your email must include the recipients email address in the body of the message or in the "TO" line of the email;
  • the subject line of the email must clearly describe the subject matter contained in the email, and the message must include valid contact information; and
  • You must not attempt to send any message to an email address if 3 consecutive delivery rejections have occurred and the time between the third rejection and the first rejection is longer than fifteen days.

Sites advertised via SPAM may not be hosted on our servers. This provision includes, but is not limited to SPAM sent via fax, email, instant messaging, or usenet/newsgroups. No organization or entity listed in the ROKSO may be hosted on our servers.

These policies apply to messages sent using your Sphere Web Hosting services, or to messages sent from any network by You or any person on your behalf that directly or indirectly refer the recipient to a site or an email address hosted via your Sphere Web Hosting service.

Sphere Web Hosting reserves the right to charge the holder of the account used to send any bulk email that may cause our IP space to be black-listed, and or make it necessary to clear the email queue, and or increases activities with the support desk or with the data centers, a non-negotiable, non-refundable, clean up fee. Reseller Account Holders and Dedicated Server Account Holders are the responsible Account Holder for their customers. All account holders are responsible for keeping their accounts and web sites secure. The cost of the clean up fee, and whether one is charged, is at the sole discretion of Sphere Web Hosting.

System and Network Security Violations
Violations of System or network security are prohibited, and may result in criminal and civil liability. Examples include, but are not limited to the following: unauthorized access, use, probe, or scan of a System's security or authentication measures, data or traffic. Interference with service to any user, host or network including, without limitation, mail bombing, flooding, deliberate attempts to overload a System and broadcast attacks.

Prohibited Content and Activities
You may not participate in activities or publish, transmit or store on or via Sphere Web Hosting's network or System any content or links to any content that Sphere Web Hosting reasonably believes:

  • Relates in any manner to child pornography, bestiality, or adult (pornographic) content of any kind;
  • is excessively violent, incites violence, threatens violence, or contains harassing content or hate speech;
  • is unfair or deceptive under the consumer protection laws of any jurisdiction, including but not limited to chain letters, pyramid schemes, FOREX, E-Gold Exchange, Ponzi, etc.;
  • is defamatory or violates a person's privacy;
  • administer Internet relay chat ("IRC"), including hosting of an IRC server, running IRC bots, use of a Sphere Web Hosting server as an IRC client or proxy, and use of IRC scripts or programs that interfere with service to other users on any server or network;
  • impersonate any person or entity;
  • forge headers or otherwise manipulate identifiers in order to disguise the origin of any Content transmitted through the Services;
  • run any open proxy service;
  • virus distribution or distribution of any worm or other harmful code;
  • use third party software without a proper license or other appropriate permission, including but not limited to Microsoft software;
  • creates a risk to a person's safety or health, creates a risk to public safety or health, compromises national security, or interferes with a investigation by law enforcement;
  • improperly expose trade secrets or other confidential or proprietary information of another person;
  • is intended to assist others in defeating technical copyright protections;
  • infringes on another person's copyright, trade or service mark, patent, or other property right;
  • promotes illegal drugs, violates export control laws, relates to illegal gambling, or illegal arms trafficking;
  • provide material support or resources, or to conceal or disguise the nature, location, source, or ownership of material support or resources to any organization(s) designated by the United States government as a foreign terrorist organization pursuant to section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act;
  • is otherwise illegal or solicits conduct that is illegal under laws applicable to You or to Sphere Web Hosting; or
  • is otherwise malicious, fraudulent, or may result in retaliation against Sphere Web Hosting by offended viewers or recipients, or is intended to harass or threaten;
  • mirror websites hosted outside of Sphere Web Hosting.

Content "published or transmitted" via Sphere Web Hosting's network or equipment includes Web content, email, bulletin board postings, chat, tweets, and any other type of posting or transmission that relies on the Internet.

Streaming Events
Sphere Web Hosting may prohibit You from streaming live events where there is a special risk, in Sphere Web Hosting's reasonable discretion, that the event may violate the Prohibited Content and Activities section above and so You must receive prior approval before streaming a live event of any kind.

Copyrighted Material
You may not use Sphere Web Hosting's network or services to download, publish, distribute, or otherwise copy or use in any manner any text, music, software, art, image, or other work protected by copyright law unless:

  • You have been expressly authorized by the owner of the copyright for the work to copy the work in that manner; or
  • You are otherwise permitted by established copyright law to copy the work in that manner.

You shall not copy, modify or translate any Sphere Web Hosting intellectual property or related documentation, disassemble or reverse engineer same, to use it other than in connection with the Services, or grant any other person or entity the right to do so. Unless otherwise specifically provided in this Agreement, You are not authorized to distribute or to authorize others to distribute Sphere Web Hosting intellectual property in any manner without the prior written consent of Sphere Web Hosting.

Shared Systems
You may not use any shared system provided by Sphere Web Hosting in a way that unnecessarily interferes with the normal operation of the shared system, or that consumes a disproportionate share of the resources of the system. For example, we may require You to repair coding abnormalities in your code if it unnecessarily conflicts with other customers' use of the Service. You agree that we may quarantine or delete any data stored on a shared system if the data is infected with a virus, or is otherwise corrupted, and has the potential to infect or corrupt the system or other customers' data that is stored on the same system.

You acknowledge and agree your account resides in a shared hosting environment and that resources need to be equally available to all users, as they pertain to performance. Within a shared environment, account holders may not:

  • Use 20% or more of System resources for longer then 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such usage; these include but are not limited to poorly written scripts or bad page coding. If your resource usage regularly exceeds this You have out-grown the realm of a shared hosting environment and will need to consider moving to a dedicated or virtual server.
  • Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons (like 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. Please note that You may link to torrents off server, but may not host or store them.
  • Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities.
  • Host any type of Topsite (Topsites are allowed on virtual and dedicated servers provided they conform with the rest of our Agreements).
  • Run any gaming servers/software/scripts of any type.
  • Run an ad or banner server of any type.
  • Run any open proxy service.
  • Execute cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes.

While we provide ample disk space for your account, all files stored on our servers must be linked from an HTML or similarly coded web page, hosted on our servers, where all content is freely available to the public. Downloadable files, media, streaming content or any file which consumes more than 500kb of space must not exceed 10% of your total used disk quota. Using a hosting account for archiving electronic files, online file storage, or file sharing is prohibited. Creating accounts that contain unregistered domain names is prohibited. All domain names on our servers must be active, registered, and resolve to Sphere servers. Expired domain names are considered unregistered. Accounts that constantly create and delete large numbers of files on a regular basis, cause file System damage or cause the server to crash will flag your account for review and could potentially result in your account being suspended.

All domain names on our servers must resolve to our servers either for web service or email service. Domains that do not resolve to Sphere servers for web service or email service will be considered file storage and in violation of the above clause and considered prohibited content. Using our domain name servers primarily to provide DNS service for domain names and services hosted outside of Sphere Web Hosting is prohibited. If you are unsure about your DNS entries you can contact customer support for a review of those records. By opening and maintaining an account with us, you agree and grant Sphere Web Hosting the right to remove prohibited content without notice.

You are allocated a monthly transfer allowance. This allowance varies depending on the hosting package You purchased. Should your account exceed the allocated amount your account will be charged an additional fee for the overages. These fees are listed on our website. Unused transfer in one month cannot be carried over to the next month. You cannot serve any content to a domain located outside your account. Accounts that consume large amounts of bandwidth and reduce the performance of other web sites will flag your account for review and could potentially result in your account being suspended.

Reservation of Rights
Sphere Web Hosting reserves the right at all times to require changes, disable as necessary any website, account, database, or other component that does not comply with its established policies, or to make any such modifications in an emergency, without notice if necessary. We also reserve the right to prohibit activities that damage Sphere Web Hosting's commercial reputation and goodwill. Any material that, in our judgment, is obscene or threatening or otherwise violates our agreements is prohibited. Sphere Web Hosting will be the sole arbiters as to what constitutes a violation of this Acceptable Use Policy.