Acceptable Use Policy

IMPORTANT

As owners of xneelo dedicated servers, we are subject to their conditions of use. Please read the Xneelo Acceptable Use Policy here and in particular their Hosting Terms here.

LAST UPDATED. 31 MAY 2023

Below are descriptions of activities PERMISSABLE AND NOT ALLOWED ON OUR SERVERS. If you own a domain or host through us, please read each item carefully to ensure that we all remain compliant.

1. CONTENT NOT ALLOWED ON WEBSITES

We do not allow any visual content or text that is offensive or illegal in any way. Such content include:

  • Plagiarised content.
  • Websites that sell or distribute pirated software or goods.
  • Pornographic, sexually explicit or content depicting or promoting violence against any person, organisation or company.
  • Any content that is injurious, abusive or degrading in any way and/or violates the privacy of any person, organisation or company.
  • Content that may be considered as discriminatory in terms of another person or entity's sex, race or age.
  • Websites that serve as a platform for gambling.
  • Content that promotes or facilitates theft, fraud, trafficking of any nature, money laundering or terrorism.

If we receive any legitimate complaint against your domain, then we will request that you modify or remove the offensive content completely.

Failure to react within 24 hours to our request, will result in:

  • your domain and services being blocked; or
  • if we have access to your site, we will remove such content without notice.

Where content is deemed criminal by nature, we will report it to the proper authorities and provide backups, arhived data or copies of such content as may be required by them. We may also disclose client information upon request by the authorities.

2. PHISHING, SPAM AND UNSOLICITED EMAILS

Using our servers to send unsolicited emails or emails with the intention to steal from or harm the recipient in any way, is strictly forbidden.

2.1 Unsolicited emails and spam

Irrespective of how you obtained the recipient's email address, explicit consent must be given by the recipient before you can send newsletters and/or marketing material. Even if you have acquired their email address through an existing business or personal relationship, you are NOT permitted to add the email address to your mailing list(s).

Emails are considered unsolicited:

  • if the recipient did not explicitly opt-in via a link on your website or a physical form to receive communication or marketing emails from you;
  • if a once-off invitation is sent to the recipient without them giving consent prior to this message; or
  • if a recipient continues to receive emails even after they have unsubscribed.

Mailing list administrators should control their lists carefully and ensure that there is a clear "UNSUBSCRIBE" link in each email.

When we receive a complaint against you for sending unsolicited communication, we will ask you to:

  • provide proof of how you obtained the reporting email address; and/or
  • give evidence of an existing history of prior communication that the recipient consented to from which no opt-out/unsubscribe instruction was received.

Read xneelo's article title "Mailing lists: spam best practices" for handy tips.

2.2 Phishing

You may not use your website, nor any mailboxes or aliases registered on your domain, to knowingly send phishing or scam messages. If a complaint is received and proven to be true, then the domain and all mailboxes will be terminated immediately.

2.3 Web forms

Ensure that you have a good web application firewall in place as well as spam protection for forms on your website. Even though not a guarantee, it will help to protect it from being used to send unsolicited messages.

If your web forms are exploited repeatedly due to a lack of action on your part, then your website will be suspended until the necessary actions have been taken. Failure to take any action will result in your domain and services being terminated.

2.4 xneelo

Note that – as our client – you are also subject to xneelo's conditions, who reserves the right to suspend or terminate your services with or without notice in accordance to their General Terms and Conditions.

Should you infringe upon xneelo's policy, you will be held liable for any costs incurred by them. Xneelo reserves the right to charge you, the owner of the account used to send any unsolicited email, a clean-up fee or charges incurred for blacklist removal. This cost of the clean-up fee is entirely at the discretion of xneelo.

3. INTERNET ABUSE

Illegal, abusive and irresponsible activities on our servers are strictly prohibited. You may not:

  • scan, probe or test for vulnerabilities in the system in order to compromise its security;
  • monitor data or traffic without our consent;
  • harm any user through mail bombing, flooding, broadcast attacks or deliberate attempts to overload the system;
  • use the internet account without the owner's authorisation;
  • use your website to trick people into providing secure/account details through phishing, password robbery, security hole or port scanning;
  • use our service to distribute emails or software that covertly collects or transmits user information;
  • perform any activity that may result in a retaliation against our network;
  • intentionally or knowingly infect our servers with any virus or contamination program;
  • forge emails or messages;
  • sell pirated software or products or provide links to such material;
  • do port scanning or use similar tools;
  • perform any activity that may breach any applicable laws, codes or regulations including the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002.

Reports of any inappropriate conduct and/or activity may cause us to deactivate or terminate all your accounts with us. Where applicable, law enforcement will be informed of the illegal activities.

4. RESOURCE USAGE

You may not use scripts that consume a disproportionate share of the server's resources. This include excessive server hits, excessive bandwidth or disk usage.

You may set up "chat" applications and cron jobs on your website, as long as it does not impact the performance of other server users. Processes that are scheduled to run automatically at certain times (cron jobs) may not be executed more often than every two hours.

5. SERVER SIDE PROCESSES

Unattended server side processes (daemons) may not be installed or operated on any of our domains. This is to protect the server's CPU and memory resources as well as for server security by preventing third-party programs to accept connections from the outside.

These processes may run at consistent high loads and will seriously risk the integrity of our servers.

We will notify you if the internal monitoring systems alert us to such processes on your domain, after which you must take immediate action to resolve the issue. Failure to do so may result in your website and/or email becoming very sluggish and, in worst cases, may force us to terminate your service.

6. SECURITY

You must take appropriate security precautions to prevent your website(s) from being hacked or your mailboxes compromised due to vulnerable equipment or weak passwords.

It is your responsibility to ensure that:

  • your website software and plugins are kept up to date;
  • a firewall and login protection plugin(s) is installed and kept up to date;
  • permissions of directories and files are set properly;
  • you use strong passwords and usernames for website backends;
  • you use strong passwords for mailboxes; and
  • all passwords are stored in a safe and secure location.

A strong password consists of at least 11 characters that is a mix of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers and allowed special characters.

We reserve the right to reset any passwords in the event that a breach has been discovered.

7. DISK USAGE

Our servers have automated systems that track disk usage and notifies us when the allowed disk space quota has been exceeded.

It is your responsibility to remain within the allowed disk space quota as per your hosting account. We will notify you if you exceed the allowed quota. If no action is taken within 30 days to reduce disk usage, then we reserve the right to upgrade your hosting package to the next level.

Ensure that you always use best practices when creating your website by uninstalling unused themes and plugins and only upload optimised images.

It is your responsibility to maintain the size of your mailbox, especially where the account has been set up as IMAP. Regularly delete old emails, unsubscribe from unwanted emails, set spam rules and delete emails with large attachments. We will bill you by the hour to clean mailboxes.

You may not use your domain as a personal storage facility. Only website and email related content are allowed.

8. TRAFFIC USAGE

We have no set traffic quota on our domains. We do expect, however, that you apply best practices so that all our clients may benefit from optimal network and hardware performance. Excessive usage on your domain will raise a flag, which will be followed up with you.

9. CONTACT US

If you have any questions about this policy or would like to report compromised accounts or behaviour, please write to mariska@tigme.com