Terms of Service & Acceptable Usage Policy 2023-02-06T11:51:52+00:00

Terms of Service & Acceptable Usage Policy

Use of WP Hosting services constitutes acceptance and agreement to the terms and conditions below, they are designed to protect and benefit all clients.  The TOS is designed to ensure quality service and performance for our customers and to maintain the integrity our our infrastructure.

Acceptable Use

All services provided by WP Hosting may be used for lawful purposes only. Transmission, storage, or presentation of any information, data or material in violation of any Australian Federal, State or Local law is prohibited. We reserve the right to refuse sites promoting things that violate the laws of other countries as well.

Note: Pornography and sex related merchandising are prohibited on any WP Hosting servers. This includes sites that may imply sexual content, or link to adult content elsewhere. This is also true for sites that promote any illegal activity or content that may be damaging to WP Hosting servers or any other server on the Internet. Links to such materials are also prohibited.

Examples of prohibited content or links include (but are not limited to): IRC software; pirated software; hacking programs or archives; warez sites; distribution of music files or any other material in which the account holder does not own the copyright; porn spamming software; adult sites; game servers (dedicated game server programs). WP Hosting will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of this provision. Content that does not meet these standards will be removed without prior notice to the subscriber.

Account Creation

Upon creating your hosting account, we will install the latest version of a default WordPress installation.  As part of the installation, a splash page containing information to assist you in getting started will be displayed.  This splash page contains links to your WP login, our knowledgebase and other important links.  You are welcome to de-activate or delete this splash page at any time.

Domain Name Registration, Renewal & Transfers

Upon registering a gTLD domain, you must also agree to the terms set out in the ICANN Registrants’ Benefits and Responsibilities document.  ccTLD domains are governed by their respective domain authorities as follows; AU – www.ausregistry.com.au  NZ – www.dnc.org.nz  UK – www.nominet.org.uk

Domain name registrations, renewals and transfers are not refundable.

Server Resources

Any website that uses a high amount of server resources (including but not limited to, CPU, memory usage and network resources) can be suspended without notice, and then may be given an option of either upgrading their service or reducing the resource needed to an acceptable level.

Email Marketing/Mass Email

Our servers are not designed for newsletter or mass email campaigns.  Our shared server environment is setup to allow 200 outbound emails per hour for each hosting account.  Any account sending mail in excess of our limits, may have outbound email limited or blocked.  Dedicated servers are not restricted to this limit.

Hardware, Equipment, and Software

You are responsible for and must provide all telephone, computer, hardware and software equipment and services necessary to access WP Hosting Services. WP Hosting makes no representations, warranties, or assurances that the client’s equipment will be compatible with WP Hosting services.

Backups and Data

WP Hosting Australia provides free daily backups for all client accounts within our network, however for added security we advise that you download local copies of critical data. We accept no responsibility for any data loss or corruption.

Full cPanel backups must be downloaded to your computer as any full cPanel backups stored on the server for longer than 7 days will be automatically removed from your account.

We retain a full backup of cancelled or terminated accounts for a maximum of 30 days.  Should you require this data, a $99 data recovery fee is payable.

Account Security

It is your responsibility to maintain secure passwords and keep all software, installations, plugins and themes up to date.  Any account which is compromised or contains malware or spam scripts may be taken offline or have infected files sent to quarantine.

In the event of an account taken offline or files sent to quarantine, you may contact us for more information so we can provide recommendations or assistance at our discretion.  You may then wish to resolve the issue yourself or employ a third party to do this for you.

Suspension, Cancellation and Termination

WP Hosting reserves the right to suspend or cancel an account holder’s access at our sole discretion. Of your breach of our terms and conditions we reserve the right to deactivate and/or remove your account from our servers immediately.

For security purposes, all service cancellations must be submitted via the client area.  If you do not know your login details, you can request a password reset here. Any outstanding invoices must be paid in full before a cancellation will be processed for the requested service.

WP Hosting reserves the right to terminate and delete all data (including backups), for any services which are terminated due to non-payment for longer than 30 days.

WP Hosting reserves the right to request annual payment for any account suspended 3 times within 12 months or with more than 20 failed credit card transactions.

Billing and Refunds

Establishment of this service is dependent upon receipt by WP Hosting of payment of stated charges.  Our billing and refund policy forms part of our terms of service and can be found here – Billing & Refund Policy

Migrations from other hosts

Hosting accounts will be migrated from your old host free of charge, unless we believe there will be extra steps outside of our normal migration procedure, which may increase the time taken to migrate the account.  We reserve the right to refuse or quote for a migration which we deem as being outside of our normal migration procedure.

Hosting accounts migrated from other hosts containing malware, malicious scripts, viruses, bots, trojans or any file we deem harmful to our network, may be suspended until either the client or ourselves have removed such files.

Before migration, we will advise of any actions or considerations you may need to undertake in relation to the hosting account, email accounts or DNS settings – either on our network or on your existing network you are moving from.

We will endeavour to complete migrations with minimal disruption to service, however we accept no responsibility for  events outside of our control, which may lead to issues that need to be addressed – This includes, but is not limited to DNS propagation, software incompatibility, data corruption, email settings, actions of your old provider.

Service Availability

We shall endeavour to provide continuing availability of services and server stability, but we shall not, in any event, be liable for service delays and interruptions or down time of the server, outside of our Service Level Agreement.

Liability and Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless WP Hosting, its contractors, and its licensors, and their respective directors, officers, employees and agents from and against any and all claims and expenses, including attorneys’ fees, arising out of your use of WP Hosting services, including but not limited to your violation of this Agreement.

Copyright and Defamation Claims

If we receive legal correspondence relating to copyright or defamation claims, we reserve the right to remove related content or issue a 14 calendar day period to allow you the opportunity to remove the content yourself. If the content is not removed within this timeframe, we reserve the right to issue an account termination notice. An account termination notice provides you with 14 calendar days to migrate your services to another hosting provider, after which time your account will be terminated and deleted from our servers.

Service Level Agreement

Service Availability;

Personal and Startup Packages are covered by a 99% (per calendar month) uptime SLA.  If availability is below 99%, a full credit is available for that month, by written request.

Business, Corporate and Enterprise Packages & Dedicated Servers are covered by a 99.9% (per calendar month) uptime SLA.  If availability is below 99.9% and above 99.5%, a 25% credit is available.  If availability is below 99.5%, a full credit is available for that month.

The availability guarantee does not apply to the functionality or operation of any software within any supplied servers, and does not apply if the service becomes unavailable due to Customer’s actions or actions of a third party.  It also will not apply to IP address blocking at the firewall or FTP and email availability, if the website is still available to other networks.

The availability guarantee also does not apply to any interruptions during our standard scheduled maintenance window which is every week from Thursday at 22:00 to 02:00 Friday AEST, or to any other maintenance periods where we have provided at least 12 hours advance notice. Maintenance periods will never be scheduled within 08:00 to 22:00 Monday to Fridays.

Interruptions are deemed to begin from the time the Customer lodges a fault ticket or phone call.  All SLA credits must be requested via a support ticket or email to support@wphosting.com.au

SLA credit will not be available to clients who have overdue invoices on their account.

SLA credit does not apply to DDoS (denial of service) attacks towards our network or originating from our network, acts of nature (earthquakes, floods, fires, etc..) or acts of terrorism or war.

SLA credit may not exceed monthly fee for any given service.

Service Performance;

All services within our network are monitored 24/7 for potential performance issues.  As a result, our service offering is generally of an extremely high standard.  There are many factors which can impact on the performance of a given service – ie) software being used, excessive traffic or denial of service attacks, internet connection speeds, usage of a service in a way that it is not designed.  As a result, service performance, speed or degradation issues are not covered by an SLA.

If you suspect a service related performance issue, please open a support ticket or send an email to support@wphosting.com.au so that we may investigate further.

Incident Reports

Outages;

For downtime greater than 60 minutes, we will issue an incident report outlining the nature of the incident and steps taken to resolve and prevent repeat occurrences.  For downtime less than 60 minutes, we will update our twitter feed with relevant information and notification of a resolution.

Website hacking or defacement;

WP Hosting offers a “best effort” Incident report for website hacking or defacement.  We do not guarantee to monitor for such issues, however we have employed security software to disable malicious code or files uploaded to your account to help protect against further hacking or defacement.  If we detect and issue, we will contact you and provide information as to the cause and best method of resolution.

As you are given the freedom to upload files to your account, you also have the freedom to unknowingly upload vulnerable or malicious files.  Malicious files will be scanned and quarantined by our malware scanners, however there is no such scan for a vulnerable file.

Firewalls, brute force and intrusion detection methods are used on our servers, however it is your obligation to ensure that best practice security measures are followed ie) strong passwords, software kept up to date.

Should you discover a hacking or defacement related issue before we do, please open a support ticket or send an email to support@wphosting.com.au so that we may investigate further.  After our investigations, we will issue an incident report outlining what has occurred and how to prevent it from reoccurring in the future.

Dedicated Server Management

Dedicated servers within our network;

Dedicated servers within our data centre environment are covered by our SLA as outlined above.  All dedicated servers which include our optional management service are monitored 24/7 for CPU, memory, load, disk space, network traffic and uptime.  In the event that we identify an issue, we will rectify and let you know if required.

Server management includes 24×7 monitoring and 1 hour of scheduled or ad-hoc maintenance per month. Maintenance or repairs outside of the included 1 hour are billed at $150/hour.

Dedicated servers outside of our network (ie. on client’s or 3rd party network);

Dedicated servers outside of our data centre environment not covered by our uptime SLA’s.

We require full FTP and SSH access to servers hosted outside of our network in order to manage, maintain and attend to any issues which may arise.  If we do not have sufficient access to the server, you agree to provide access upon our request.

Server management includes 24×7 monitoring for CPU, memory, load, disk space, network traffic and uptime, plus 1 hour of scheduled or ad-hoc maintenance per month. Maintenance or repairs outside of the included 1 hour are billed at $250/hour.

WordPress Maintenance

WordPress, plugin and theme updates are only provided to clients who opt-in for this service.  WordPress maintenance includes updating WP minor and major releases, updating plugins and updating themes.

We will always make a backup of the website before completing any updates so that you can roll back in the event of an issue.  Updates will only be run for themes and plugins with automatic updates enabled.  Any themes or plugins which require manual updates or have had their version number modified, will not be managed and will require the attention of yourself or your web developer.

We follow best practices when updating any WordPress installation and always make a backup.  However, as we are not the authors of the plugins and themes you may have installed, we can not guarantee they will be bug-free or function as described by the author.  If issues do arise due to a plugin or theme update, you can roll back the update or contact the author or your web developer.

Anti-Bribery and Corruption

WP Hosting will not engage in corrupt business practices;

We will implement measures to prevent bribery and corruption by any director, employee, contractor or other party representing WP Hosting;

We will, at a minimum, comply with all applicable laws, regulations and standards or, where internal policies require a higher standard, will apply and comply with such higher standard;

WP Hosting prohibits the giving and receiving of gifts in connection with our operations which go beyond common courtesies associated with general commercial practice. This is to ensure that the offer or acceptance of a gift does not create an obligation or cannot be construed or used by others to allege favouritism, discrimination, collusion or similarly unacceptable practices by WP Hosting.

Any gift, entertainment or other personal favour or assistance offered, given or received which has a value above A$50 must be recorded in the Gift and Entertainment Register if the gift is accepted. If a gift offered to a WP Hosting employee or contractor is refused it shall only be entered on the register if the grounds for refusal were concerns that the gift/entertainment was excessive or likely to (or be perceived as likely to) improperly obtain/retain a business advantage.

TOS Updates

We reserve the right to revise, amend and modify the WP Hosting Terms of Service at any time.

Questions

If you would like further information or have any questions regarding our terms of service, please do not hesitate to contact us using our contact us form or call 1300 974 678.