Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy & Service Level Agreement

Introduction

JohnCompanies Inc (hereafter JCI) provides dedicated servers, VPS servers and shared hosting and email services with fast and low-latency Internet connectivity to individuals and businesses. Other features such as domain registration, DNS service and firewalling are also provided. Additionally, a highly technical level of customer support is available to help you install, configure, and maintain the services you wish to run on your server.

This document describes the service that is offered, the specific levels of service you will receive, and describes some activities that are prohibited.

Note you must be 18 years or older to order any service from JohnCompanies.

Setting aside the legalese and market-speak, we will uphold our end of this agreement to the best of our ability in an honest and straightforward fashion. We will support you with highly technical personnel who also understand the social context that this service exists in. In return, we ask that you follow the terms spelled out in this agreement.

The Company

JCI provides internet access - specifically colocation services in the form of dedicated servers and completely autonomous virtual private server (VPS) instances running on top of very large, scalable enterprise hardware. The VPS services consist of a specific version of a computer operating system made remotely accessible through TCP/IP protocols for a certain fee per unit time.

The specific operating system, the fee charged per unit time, and the unit time itself are agreed upon before commencement of service.

JCI reserves the right to refuse or terminate service to anyone, at any time and for any reason, including but not limited to violation of the JCI’s Acceptable Use Policy. Should JCI terminate Customer’s service for a reason other than violation of the Acceptable Use Policy, JCI will provide thirty (30) days notice and will issue Customer a refund for the remaining paid period of service. Under no circumstances is JCI responsible for any damages resulting from termination of service.

The Service(s)

Your server or web and email hosting will be made available to you for a set monthly fee for a period of at least one month (or less if your agreement is on an hourly, daily or weekly basis). If you are unhappy with it for any reason in the first 2 days, you may terminate the service for a full refund and no further commitment.

Unless you cancel within the initial two-day period, you agree to pay the service fee for the initial billing period you sign up for.

In return for these payments, you will have a 99.9% or better period of connectivity to the public Internet measured in one minute intervals. Further, you will receive technical support for issues related to your Service. Your requested entries in our DNS servers will have the same availability, as will any firewall entries you give to us to be implemented on our firewall.

Network connectivity will always be sufficient to ensure low latency and high-speed traffic flow, and will be at a speed much greater than the average sustained throughput that you are allocated during the signup process.

Technical support will be provided on a same day basis, usually within an hour, by highly qualified engineers and technicians.

Payment

Payments are due on the account due date which is usually adjusted to the first of the month. If payment is not received by the due date and following an email notice to Customer that payment is past due, Customer’s account may be suspended. Accounts may be terminated and servers deleted after fifteen (15) calendar days in a suspended state. Backup files will be maintained for sixty (60) days and made available to Customers on terminated accounts upon payment of all amounts due. Accounts past due may be subject to interest at the rate of 1.5% per month

Charges will be billed according to the price list currently in effect as listed on the JCI’s web site. Customer may cancel an account or service at any time. For month-to-month billing, Customer is responsible for the current month’s charges. Prepaid accounts are not refundable if Customer chooses to terminate the account before the prepaid period has expired, however JCI may consider full or partial refunds as the situation warrants.

VPS Servers

You agree that your VPS server may require rebooting on rare occasions for maintenance or other reasons and that generally you will be given 2 days notice prior to the reboot. You also agree that in some cases you will be given less notice or no notice in critical or emergency situations. THIS MEANS WE MAY REBOOT YOUR VPS SERVER, BUT GENERALLY YOU WILL BE GIVEN 2 OR MORE DAYS PRIOR NOTICE. THIS HAPPENS RARELY.

The directories you specify will be backed up once every 24 hours and not more frequently. Every 24 hours the previous backup will be destroyed and a new one made (though we may opt to store your backups longer, up to 7 days). These backups are stored in a secure filesystem, but are not encrypted. Although it is not our practice, the nature of colocating a server with a hosting service implies that that the hosting service has the ability to view and alter the contents of your server. We will never do this without your explicit instructions (usually relating to server recovery of some kind).

We will provide Internet connectivity for data transfer (in + out) totaling the amount agreed to during your signup process. You will have the ability to halt traffic after reaching this level, or continue and pay a fee for each unit of bandwidth above and beyond the included amount. The included amount of bandwidth and disk space you are allotted is specified during signup, as is the unit cost for additional bandwidth and disk space.

Dedicated Servers

Our standard OS offering is the most recent version of Ubuntu. We will install Ubuntu on any of our dedicated servers and certify that the server and installed OS are compatible and fully operational.

We also can provide dedicated servers with a variety of other operating systems including FreeBSD, Redhat, Debian, SuSe, Gentoo and Fedora.

These optional OSs can be installed in two different ways:

JohnCompanies Install
We will install the OS version of your choice and determine that the OS and hardware are operational when we turn it over to you. If you run into problems we will do a re-install of the OS the first time at no charge. Subsequent re-installs will be billed on an hourly basis (re-loads usually take an hour or so and run about $100.) Typically with any install, we will need you to provide information as to hostname, swap space, disk partitions, time zone, etc.

Self Install
You may install the OS the way you want via a remote access (IP) KVM using our local iso image repository or your own media CD or DVD in your computer. We will assist if you run into problems and need to re-install the OS.

We retain full responsibility for all hardware and network issues and will make repairs in an as expeditious manner as possible. Some repairs, e.g., failed drives in RAID1 machines, will be replaced during off-peak hours and coordinated with you to minimize the impact on your operations.

Once we hand over the dedicated server to you, you will be responsible for all OS, software and RAID health* issues but we will provide assistance and support upon request. If your server ever runs into problems or become unreachable, we will (upon request) connect a remote (IP) KVM to your server to allow you to make repairs, recover, or reinstall your server.
* we will preinstall and/or provide RAID monitoring tools which allow you to monitor your RAID device(s) status.

Each JCI dedicated server may come with a given amount of backup space on our local backup server. Data transfer to and from the backup server does not count against your monthly bandwidth allocation. We provide backup scripts and assistance if you need it, however you are responsible for choosing what is backed up, running the backup process and monitoring the results.

At your option you may add encrypted offsite or geo-redundant filesystem backup (rsync, ftp/sftp/scp, rdiff-backup, WebDAV) from third parties. (Note data transfer to and from the backup service from your dedicated server will count against your monthly server bandwidth allocation.)

Service Level Agreement

Your services will operate on a Linux filesystem of a certain size for a certain monthly fee, both of which are determined when you become a customer of JCI. In return your filesystem and the computer system it exists on will have a 99.5% or better period of connectivity to the public Internet measured in one minute intervals. Further, you will receive technical support for issues related to your filesystem and its use.

You agree that the computer system that houses your filesystem will require downtime for consistency checks on rare occasions and that you will generally be given two to four days notice prior to this type of maintenance. You also agree that in some cases you will be given less or no notice.

You agree with the policy of JCI to always trade system uptime for maintenance purposes, and agree that extended periods of system downtime on rare occasions are required to ensure server, network and data integrity are acceptable, and further, will not be computed into the monthly system uptime percentage.

JCI does not examine the contents of Customer filesystems. However, during the course of normal operation and maintenance, certain meta-data such as filenames, directory structures, traffic levels and patterns may be observed. The Company does not store logs of customer activity.

No form of data or meta-data concerning the contents of Customer filesystems, or even Customer data that we hold in our records for billing, will ever be divulged without your consent or unless in response to legal process or law enforcement request.

JCI strongly recommends that all customers use strong passwords and maintain utmost security for accessing their server or web site.

In the extremely unlikely event that JCI ceases to operate any Service, we will notify our customers 60 days in advance of any service termination.

Acceptable Use Policy

Customer is responsible for complying with United States federal, state, and local laws, and applicable laws of any other countries with which Customer uses the Internet to communicate. Customer may not participate in or support any illegal activities through the use of their Service.

You agree that you will not use our Service(s) in a manner (as determined by JCI in its sole and absolute discretion) that:

• Is illegal, or promotes or encourages illegal activity;
  
• Promotes, encourages or engages in defamatory, harassing, abusive or otherwise objectionable behavior;
  
• Promotes, encourages or engages in child pornography or the exploitation of children;
  
• Promotes, encourages or engages in hate speech, hate crime, terrorism, violence against people, animals, or property, or intolerance of or against any protected class;
  
• Promotes, encourages or engages in any spam or other unsolicited bulk email, or computer or network hacking or cracking;
  
• Violates the Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act of 2008 or similar legislation, or promotes, encourages or engages in the sale or distribution of prescription medication without a valid prescription;
  
• Infringes on the intellectual property rights of any person or entity;
  
• Violates the privacy or publicity rights of any person or entity, or breaches any duty of confidentiality that you owe to any other person or entity;
  
• Contains or installs any viruses, worms, bugs, Trojan horses or other code, files or programs designed to, or capable of, disrupting, damaging or limiting the functionality of any software or hardware;
  
• Contains false or deceptive language, or unsubstantiated or comparative claims, regarding the Company’s Services.

In addition you agree that you will not

• Send unsolicited commercial or bulk email to any party for any reason.
  
• Access, or attempt to access a computer or network resource that you are not authorized to access.
  
• 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.
  
• Store, transmit, create, or examine any pictures of a sexual nature, realistic or not, of humans, anthropomorphic depictions of human-like creatures, or images suggesting humans that are under the age of 18 years.
  
• Forge email headers or TCP/IP packet headers.
  
• Distribute worms, trojans, or viruses, or commit or attempt to commit any denial of service attack against any computer, network, or individual.
  
• Violate export controls on any software or intellectual property.
  
• Run a public ircd server of any kind or bots connected to a public irc server. (you can run an ircd server, but only a private server, non-linked, and not open to any public users). NOTE: you can run as many irc clients as you want just not any public servers or bots.
  
• No modern graphical game server (like halflife, quake[1,2,3], etc). You can run a text mud, but no hogs like the above, please.
  

Termination

We reserve the right to terminate your account, and any future business relation with you, for any reason at any time. If we initiate a termination you will not be charged beyond the current payment month and will receive a refund for any unused time.

Also note that we understand that certain violations of the above terms can occur inadvertently, and even as a result of unauthorized access from some third party. We will do our best to weigh the merits of each individual case and act with common sense and an understanding of the technical and social implications of each situation.

Limitations of Liability and Warranty Matters

JCI services are provided as-is, and are to be used at Customer’s own risk. JCI provides no warranties of any kind, expressed or implied, including warranties of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. JCI is not responsible for hardware or software damage, loss of wages or data, or any other financial or personal loss resulting from the use of, or inability to use, the service.

Customer is responsible for all actions taken or caused to be taken in Customer’s use of the JCI’s service and for the security and integrity of their own services, including Internet services. JCI will not be held liable for any security breaches that may occur.

As a condition of service, Customer agrees to indemnify and hold harmless JCI officers, employees, agents, shareholders, and partners from any cause of action originating from use of the JCI’s service or that may result from a breach in the security of Customer’s server or Customer’s services.

IN NO EVENT SHALL JCI, ITS OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, OR AGENTS BE LIABLE TO YOU OR ANY OTHER PERSON OR ENTITY FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, PUNITIVE, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES WHATSOEVER, INCLUDING ANY THAT MAY RESULT FROM (1) SECURITY BREACHES OF YOUR SERVERS OR SERVICES, (2) ANY CONTENT OR CONTENT THAT IS DEFAMATORY, HARASSING, ABUSIVE, HARMFUL TO MINORS OR ANY PROTECTED CLASS, PORNOGRAPHIC, “X-RATED”, OBSCENE OR OTHERWISE OBJECTIONABLE ON YOUR SERVER(S), (3) ANY CONTENT ON YOUR SERVER(S) THAT IS IN VIOLATON OF US LAWS OR REGUALATONS THAT VOLATES COPYRIGHT, PATENT, PROPERTY OR PROPRIETARY RIGHTS OF THIRD PARTIES, AND/OR (4) ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE OF ANY KIND INCURRED AS A RESULT OF YOUR USE OF THE COMPANY’S SERVICES, WHETHER BASED ON WARRANTY, CONTRACT, TORT, OR ANY OTHER LEGAL OR EQUITABLE THEORY, AND WHETHER OR NOT THE COMPANY IS ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

YOU SPECIFICALLY ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT IN NO EVENT SHALL THE JCI’S TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY EXCEED THE TOTAL AMOUNT PAID BY YOU FOR THE PARTICULAR SERVICES THAT ARE THE SUBJECT OF THE CAUSE OF ACTION.

THE FOREGOING LIMITATION OF LIABILITY SHALL APPLY TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, AND SHALL SURVIVE ANY TERMINATION OR EXPIRATION OF THESE TERMS OF USE OR YOUR USE OF THIS SITE OR THE SERVICES FOUND AT THIS SITE.

Summary

If you uphold your end of this agreement, we will uphold our end and do our best to provide intelligent, useful service at a reasonable price.

* We define a gigabyte as 1000 megabytes.