C-Online provides web hosting to clients worldwide, and we have a responsibility to protect each client and to provide the best services available. All clients of C-Online are subject to the following terms of service:
INDEMNIFICATION POLICY
You agree to use all C-Online services and facilities at your own risk. C-Online specifically disclaims all warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. In no event shall C-Online be liable for any loss, or loss of data, or other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential or other damages. Customer agrees that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold C-Online harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and claims, including reasonable attorney’s fees asserted against C-Online, its agents, its customers, officers and employees, that may arise or result from any service provided or performed or agreed to be performed or any product sold by customer, it’s agents, employees or assigns. Customer agrees to defend, indemnify and hold harmless C-Online against liabilities arising out of any injury to person or property caused by any products sold or otherwise distributed in connection with C-Online’s server. C-Online reserves the right to intervene with any of the sites hosted on its servers in the interest of its customers. Any material supplied by customer infringing or allegedly infringing on the proprietary rights of a third party Copyright infringement any defective products sold to customer from C-Online’s server. C-Online shall be the sole judge of what violates this Policy.
You exempt and indemnify the registry / registrar from all loss relating to your registration of a domain name (CLAUSE 5)
WEB DESIGN/DEVELOPMENT & GRAPHIC DESIGN SERVICES:
By accepting your quotation and paying your 50% deposit to C-Online you indicate your agreement
to the terms and conditions set forth below.
Quotations are valid for 30 (thirty) days.
Terms of payment
A Deposit of 50% (non-refundable) of the total is payable on acceptance of quote.
Work will not commence until proof of payment has been received. The balance is due prior to launch of website or handover of final designs.
Websites & designs will not be launched or handed over until full payment has been received.
Content and Design
All content must be supplied for website design & development to commence.
Proofs and Mock-ups
You will receive electronic proofs of your website design & layout and any other design work.
It is the responsibility of the client to approve artwork before web development commences. Any amendments on electronic proofs must be indicated clearly.
Proof reading is the responsibility of the client and not that of C-Online
We only accept the following approval methods: Email and written approval (telephonic approval will not be accepted).
Design and development
The design fee makes provision for a maximum of three (5) revisions of the draft design. Any revisions after this will be charged at R150.00 per draft. This is applicable to both website and corporate identity designs.
Lead time: A maximum of 10 working days for electronic proofs and once artwork has been approved. Once artwork is approved for corporate identity, please allow for 2-3 working days for final artwork.
The lead time may be affected by detail & content of website.
C-Online cannot be held responsible for late delivery due to reasons outside our control.
You will be notified immediately if your website or design work will take longer than anticipated.
Copyright
All designs, coding and artwork remain the copyright of C-Online and may not be reproduced, copied or modified in any way without written consent from C-Online.
“Designed by Victoria & Rose, Developed by C-Online” or the likes there of, will thus discreetly appear on the bottom of all websites.
The client indemnifies C-Online against any claims, costs and expenses arising out of the infringement of copyright, patent or design.
Cancellation Policy
Cancellation of an order will result in forfeiting any deposit paid.
Should the cancellation of an order be received once an order has been completed, the balance and / or full invoiced amount shall be payable.
- BILLING:
At this time we bill monthly, quarterly, semi-annually and annually, depending upon the plan. For Web Hosting plans we will setup your account without any payment. Clients are encouraged to pay by EFT as it is the easiest way to handle payment at this time. There are no contract periods but for each successive period, your contract is automatically renewed unless we are notified otherwise.
Please note we do not refund full amounts since purchase, if unsatisfied with service we refund you only for that month alone. Only web hosting is refundable. Note: We only refund to Bank Accounts.
Please Note: Accounts with Proof of payment are not always guaranteed activation or credit, due to us having a large amount of fake proof of payments being sent. Hence billing team will do this with approval from management or until payment reflects. Please ensure you submit proof of payment earlier than due date to ensure your account stays active.
We do not apply any refunds prior to 60 days for any service. This is to protect us from customer’s large payments to us forgetting to cancel their Debit Order or EFT scheduled payments. Customers need to ensure when they cancel that they cancel their automated payments to us, if any.
Each account as a domain set. Please note this in no way can be changed after the first week of existence, please apply for a new package if you require a new domain to be used.
Free Domain Registration for some annual packages applies (where and if on promotion) to the following extensions only: .co.za,.org.za,.web.za,.net.za
Please note we do not register any domains without or before payment is made
- NON REFUNDABLE SERVICES:
- Domains Registered
- Deposit for web design, web development and/or graphic design services.
- CREDITS:
Credits on accounts due to incorrect billing by Billing department will be processed immediately.
Amendments
You agree that C-Online may amend this agreement at any time without notice to you. You agree to keep advised of any changes to this agreement.
- LATE PAYMENTS:
All accounts are billed according to the dates they were first activated on. If you will not pay for service renew or services rendered 7 days after invoice due date, your account or website will be suspended. If you will not pay for service renew or services rendered in 90 days after the due date, your account or website will be terminated. You will receive email reminders as well as an invoice before the due date to remind you of payment.
C-Online will not be held liable for the loss or suspension of customer services due to non-payment.
We recommend customers pay a few days before due date to ensure their accounts or hosting does not get suspended or terminated.
- DOMAINS:
Domain Purchases are non-refundable.
Transfer fees are non-refundable when domain is already transferred.
If you are registering or transferring a domain name you must also agree to the Domain Name Registration Agreement.
Domains shall be renewed at the same price as new registrations.
Domain renewal reminders will be sent in advance of expiration via email.
Domains are ONLY auto renewed with a positive credit balance containing enough funds to renew the domain/s.
After 29 days of being expired, domains enter the redemption period. At this point, eNom requires renewal fee of $250 to $300 to renew the domain name. C-Online will request that you to pay this cost until the 36th day past expiration, after which the domain will no longer be available and may have to be re-registered when it becomes available.
If Invoices are not paid on time by due date and domain has expired and redemption stage passed the invoice may go into cancelled state as it will now need to be re-registered.
Should an expired domain enter the redemption period, the cost of restoring the domain shall be no more than R3200.
Prices to domains can change unexpectedly at any time.
Kindly note we do not register premium domains (Domains with 3 characters). If for any reason a premium domain is registered there may be an additional cost
Should a reseller’s client contact us to renew a domain we will assist only in such a request.
Kindly note and ensure all your domains are renewed when and as they should be, usually you have 30 days after expiry to pay before a domain goes into redemption stage. Please pay to ensure all goes through successfully.
We do not assist client’s clients in anyway – it is against policy and unethical to do so
Free Domain Registration for some annual packages applies (where and if on promotion) to the following extensions only: .co.za,.org.za,.web.za,.net.za
If for any reason your domain is not registered or transferred correctly, C-Online, its directors, agents or employees WILL UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER BE LIABLE for any reason including human error. Hence please check that your domain is registered or transferred correctly at all times. We will however do our best to assist as best we can in transferring and registration of each and every domain.
Should a client’s client contact us to transfer a domain we will not assist unless written consent from our client is provided or Form 2 of COZA (Uniforum) is done with attached affidavit
Exemption and Indemnity of the Registry
THE REGISTRY ITS DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, AND AGENTS WILL UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, PUNITIVE OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OF ANY KIND AND HOWSOEVER ARISING (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, LOSS OF USE, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION OR LOST PROFITS), REGARDLESS OF THE FORM OF ACTION, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, DELICT, OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF THE REGISTRY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
THE APPLICANT WILL INDEMNIFY, DEFEND, AND HOLD THE REGISTRY AND ITS DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, AND AGENTS HARMLESS AGAINST ANY AND ALL CLAIMS, DAMAGES, LIABILITIES, COSTS, AND EXPENSES (INCLUDING REASONABLE LEGAL FEES AND EXPENSES) RELATING TO OR ARISING OUT OF TO THE APPLICANT’S DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATION.
- RESOURCE USAGE:
Users may not:
1) Use 25% or more of system resources for longer than 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.
2) Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
3) Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy) on shared servers.
4) Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
5) Run any bit torrent application, tracker, or client. You may link to legal torrents off-site, but may not host or store them on our shared servers.
6) Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities
7) Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc
8) Run cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes.
9) Run any MySQL queries longer than 15 seconds. MySQL tables should be indexed appropriately.
10) When using PHP include functions for including a local file, include the local file rather than the URL. Instead of include(“https://yourdomain.com/include.php”) use include(“include.php”)
11) To help reduce usage, do not force html to handle server-side code (like php and shtml).
12) Only use https protocol when necessary; encrypting and decrypting communications is noticeably more CPU-intensive than unencrypted communications.
- EXCESSIVE USAGE:
To ensure service levels within the Shared Hosting platform are stable and reliable, C-Online utilises various methods to protect its customers and associated systems from abuse which includes, but is not limited to, the following:
Excessive SQL Databases: Services with SQL databases larger than 4GB individually, or if a database is deemed to be negatively affecting the shared hosting platform (i.e. if the database uses 200% more resources than our average database, or exceeds a reasonable RAM allocation).
Excessive inode count: Services with an inode count in excess of 200 000 may result in adverse effect on server performance and is may be deemed abuse at C-Online’s discretion. You will need to upgrade to a VPS Server if necessary.
Excessive domain, email and FTP services: C-Online does not set specified limits to the domain, email and FTP services, but at its sole discretion may suspend or deactivate a service should it adversely be impacting the performance of the Shared Hosting environment.
Excessive bandwidth and disk I/O usage.
No Gambling sites, Lottery sites, Pornography sites, Bitcoin, Music, Movies or excessive streaming allowed as this is for web hosting,vps hosting and web services alone and to have fair usage and environment for all clients.
We note any usage above 300GB as excessive per month but only if it affects other customers by causing high disk I/O or network usage is used excessively.
- ZERO TOLERENCE PHISHING POLICY
Any account found to be hosting a phishing page will be suspended and/or terminated with or without notice at our discretion. Phishing is defined as any site that masquerades as another trustworthy site in attempts to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, credit card information, banking information, pin numbers, or any other personal information.
Phishing pages result in stolen identities, stolen banking information, stolen credit card information, and fraud that can cause the victims of these pages weeks, months, years, or even a lifetime of problems. Due to the serious issues that phishing pages cause, phishing is not something that is taken lightly. In the event that your account is suspended for phishing there is a very good chance that your account will not be re-enabled.
Any account suspended or terminated due to a phishing policy violation will be ineligible for refund. We may invoice you an hourly fee of R750 per hour rounded up to the nearest hour for all time spent investigating any report that results in account suspension or termination.
- SPAMMING
Why has my Account or Server been suspended?
As part of our agreements with you, you agree to accept the bounce back limit and to not send spam. If we suspect that you have violated our agreements with you, we will suspend your account. Whenever possible we attempt to notify you prior to suspending your account.
We give a 3 strike policy we will assist in stopping the spam for you which will continue to monitor. If we find the spam to continue more than 3 times we have no choice but to suspend your server/service indefinitely to protect our other users.
Below are more reasons why your account may be suspended. To resolve an issue, please contact info@c-online.co.za.
Unverified Email Addresses — we might suspend your account if your email contacts has too many unverified email addresses. If we receive bounce back emails from these addresses, we suspect the addresses have been used for spamming.
Spam Complaints — we might suspend your account because we received too many spam complaints. This means than an unacceptable number of recipients of your email campaign have actively flagged the message as spam and indicated that they either did not ask to receive the messages, or that they do not know who you (the sender) is.
Remember that we define spam as any message sent without the recipient’s prior consent to receive the message(s). A fine of R400 will be applied if serious bounce backs and spam is suspected and found. We then provide one last warning.
No Refunds will be given to customers found.
- ANTI-SPAM / ANTI-VIRUS
We use clamd antivirus and spamassassin to SCAN all emails. Note no service provider is full proof hence we always recommend your local PCs antivirus be updated and on at all times.
Antivirus recommendations: Avast or AVG
- TROUBLESHOOTING / SUPPORT
We try and assist every customer new or existing with support.
We can never guarantee we can solve your website issues. Though we will surely try and resolve the issues if we can.
You agree that we will not be held liable due to human error causing financial loss or issue of any sort. We will try and assist where we can as best we can but it is the clients’ responsibility to ensure all works as requested and inform us if there are any issues.
If you migrate your website or application to us please note we can never guarantee it will work on our servers as other web hosts have custom setups. Some hosts use third party applications we may not support as well as their setups may differ from our own servers.
Kindly ensure all your issues are resolved or brought to our attention via emails, chats or tickets as history and any pending requests are kept for no more than 3 months. This excludes transactions, invoices or credit history.
At times we require a swift response from clients on issues/reports/complaints hence if we receive no response within 24 hours on any urgent matter that may cause major downtime, blacklisting, etc. We will go ahead with what we believe to be the best solution.
C-Online Support will not install any software or applications or change settings on other hosts servers even if clients request it. This is to protect us from the other host with respect to legal issues if found or our customers customer that may involve us in legal issues. Hence unfortunately we cannot do this.
C-Online hosts servers in Hetzner’s data center hence you will be required to upload data via FTP or SSH no matter the size.
C-Online cannot assist in setting up servers with any other host or ISP. This is your sole responsibility to request support from that host or ISP. It also against our internal policy as we need to focus on our customers at all times.
We reserve the right to stop assisting you if we feel we do not have the knowledge or know how to solve your customer application issues or your application does not work on our servers
- BULK EMAIL
Why has my Account been suspended?
Bulk Emailing excessively from your account that causes shared web hosting servers to become unresponsive or slower than normal due to large amounts of account spamming via a reseller account or shared hosting account is also seen as spamming or abuse on the network and will be suspended immediately.
- LIMITATION OF LIABILITY:
C-Online shall not be responsible for any claimed damages, including incidental and consequential damages, which may arise from C-Online servers going off-line or being unavailable for any reason whatsoever. Furthermore, C-Online shall not be responsible for any claimed damages, including incidental or consequential damages, resulting from the corruption or deletion of any web site from one of C-Online servers. All damages shall be limited to the immediate termination of service.
- DISCLAIMER:
C-Online cannot be held liable for system downtime, crashes, or data loss. We cannot be held liable for any predicted estimate of profits in which a client would have gained if their site was functioning. Certain services provided by C-Online are resold. Thus, certain equipment, routing, software, and programming used by C-Online are not directly owned or written by C-Online. Moreover, C-Online holds no responsibility for the use of our clients’ accounts. If any terms or conditions are failed to be followed, the account in question will be automatically deactivated. We reserve the right to remove any account without advanced notice for any reason without restitution as C-Online sees fit. FURTHERMORE, C-Online retains the right to change any or all of the above Policies, Guidelines, and Disclaimer without notification.
- UNLIMITED HOSTING:
What’s not allowed in “Unlimited”?
Basically, sites whose essential purpose is to use disk or bandwidth.
When making a website, you should be thinking about “How can I make an interesting site for my visitors while minimizing my server storage, bandwidth, file system, memory, and cpu impact as much as possible?”
The result will be a better experience for your visitors, your web host, and yourself!
Here are some specific examples of things not allowed:
Copyrighted content to which you do not hold usage or distribution rights.
File upload / sharing / archive / backup / mirroring / distribution sites.
A site created primarily to drive traffic to another site.
Making your account resources available (whether for free or pay) to the general public.
C-Online’s “unlimited” features on shared web hosting service is not intended to allow a single or few subscribers to unfairly or adversely impact the hosting experience of other subscribers. If this occurs the website will be stopped and owner informed. We may suspend the account in severe cases.
- WEBSITE TRANSFERS:
END USERS: We assist with transferring your websites if under 5 websites on cPanel infrastructure (Note this is done via queue system so we do it as we can, hence may be delay in transfers)
- SHARED WEB HOSTING / VPS HOSTING:
By using Hosting services provided by C-Online, you accept the agreement to these terms of use. C-Online reserves the right, at its discretion, to modify these terms at any time. Please check these terms regularly for changes. Your continued use of C-Online following the posting of any changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes.
C-Online reserves the right to remove any file from its servers that it determines is in violation of its rules and guidelines. Users are solely responsible for all files contained in their own directories. The following is a list of content and behaviour that is NOT acceptable on web pages hosted by C-Online:
- Content that promotes or contains links to sites containing nudity, pornography, adult material, sex, exploitation of children, etc.
- Content that infringes on copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret or other intellectual property. This includes serial numbers for software for the purpose of illegally registering or validating software, unlawful MP3 music files, copyrighted images or videos, etc. You may not use C-Online’s services or servers in any manner which infringes the intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights of any third party including, without limitation, material protected by copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, or other intellectual property right used without proper authorization. Infringement may result from, among other activities, the unauthorized copying and posting of pictures, logos, software, articles, musical works, and videos. In compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”),
- Content that condones, promotes, contains, or links to unlawful products or activities, including cracks, hacks, their associated utilities, or other piracy related information. fraudulent goods, services, schemes, or promotions (i.e., make money fast schemes, chain letters, pyramid schemes, ponzi schemes), or furnish false data on any signup form, contract or online application or registration, or fraudulently use any information obtained through the use of C-Online’s servers or services, including without limitation use of credit card numbers.
- Web sites using our free service (where and if, on promotion) that primarily serve non-html files. Non-html content includes binary files, downloads, large images, streaming media, video clips, programs (e.g. .exe), large media files split into multiple small ones, archived material (e.g. .zip, .rar, .ace, etc). Or sites with little html content, and whose main purpose is for sharing non-html files for download. Sites using C-Online’s free service (where and if, on promotion) may not exceed 250MB of bandwidth per month per account.
- Spanning Web sites over multiple accounts in order to increase available web space. Each account must host its own website and may not be a duplicate or an extension of another website on C-Online’s servers.
- “hotlinking” site is not allowed in C-Online’s service. All non-html files must be linked to html pages on the user’s site. Links to non-html files on a user’s page from other sites must FIRST link to an html page on that user’s account. Other sites may NOT link directly to non-html content such as images.
- Content that promotes the sending of unsolicited e-mail (spam), or mail fraud schemes. Users who utilize C-Online’s resources, including e-mail addresses for spam are also subject to prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. Note: We also do not reimburse any payments when found spamming.
- Content that is racist, or otherwise extremely offensive to others, including content which threatens or abuses others.
- Sites that abuse our upload services by excessive uploading or attempting to maintain a long-term persistent connection. This includes Web Cam sites that “camp” on the FTP servers to continuously update images.
- Free hosting accounts will only be provided to clients residing in South Africa (where and if, on promotion).
- For service in other languages e.g. cn.c-online.co.za, If the act of the user account in the jurisdiction could be considered illegal or anything that adversely affects C-Online, then the site would be taken away.
Developers and/or Web Designers need to be able to provide their customers with technical support and fix issues related to their sites. C-Online will help where we can but cannot guarantee we can resolve issues related to coding or transfers that were not completed correctly by the designer or developer.
C-Online cannot be held liable for a designer or developer requesting support for technical issues and not getting the answers they require or support they expect especially when related to services and support we cannot offer.
Mysql and SQL Server external connections should NOT overwhelm our servers and we open these ports for non-abusive, non-syncing and only for our customers to make changes to their databases as required, please do not run high resource queries that could cause issues via this as it may lead us to consider closing these ports.
C-Online provides no-banner free hosting services.
- OVERAGES:
Please note if you do not stay within the bounds of your plan you can receive an overage bill.
We reserve the right and without notification to charge for such overages
You may query this with support department at any time if you so choose
- INODE LIMITATIONS:
Excessive inode count: Services with an inode count in excess of 200 000 (soft limit) may result in adverse effect on server performance and is may be deemed abuse at C-Online’s discretion – These accounts will be removed from backups – We have however set a hard limit of 250 000 per hosting “user” account.
Accounts found to be exceeding the 200,000 inode limit will automatically be removed from our backup system to avoid over-usage. Every file (a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode.
Sites that slightly exceed our inode limits are unlikely to be suspended; however, accounts that constantly create and delete large numbers of files on a regular basis, have hundreds of thousands of files, or cause file system damage may be flagged for review and/or suspension. The primary cause of excessive inodes seems to be due to users leaving their catchall address enabled, but never checking their primary account mailbox. Over time, tens of thousands of messages (or more) build up, eventually pushing the account past our inode limit. To disable your default mailbox, login to cPanel and choose “Mail”, then “Default Address”, “Set Default Address”, and then type in: :fail: No such user here.
- BACKUP LIMIT – SHARED HOSTING:
Any shared account using more than 20 GBs of disk space or 100000 inodes will be removed from our backups. We backup all content to dedicated backup servers which helps protect against data loss in the event of a drive failure.
We don’t backup SUSPENDED accounts by us or resellers
We don’t keep email backups for retrieval. We have Mail Server backups only
We keep weekly and daily backups on most servers.
- LOSS OR CORRUPTION OF DATA:
You acknowledge and agree that C-Online is not and shall not be responsible or liable for any loss or corruption of data that you may experience on the Services or otherwise, nor are we required to return to you any data that you have stored on the Services. This includes, without limitation, the loss or corruption of data resulting from the suspension, deletion, or modification of your web pages or the C-Online site, network, system, or server “crashes” or outages, or other power outages, damage caused by viruses, worms, or security breaches, file corruption, and any other cause. We recommend that you to maintain backup versions of your web pages and related information to help protect yourself against such losses. We however do server backups daily and account weekly backups and have and will continue to do our utmost to protect all our clients’ even free hosting (where and if, on promotion) client’s data to the fullest extent with all our backup software and servers.
- TERM/TERMINATION:
- Term. This agreement shall be effective upon when applying for hosting services from C-Online.
- You may terminate this Agreement immediately for any reason at any time by sending mail to info@c-online.co.za.
- Termination by C-Online.
- When account is cancelled and terminated backups are only kept for a period of 1 week. Please contact us within 1 week if you require backup of your cancelled account.
Rude or inappropriate behaviour towards staff will not be tolerated under any circumstances. We have zero tolerance approach to any kind of abusive behaviour. Ultimately, the quality of work done in the office as a whole suffers. Rude behaviour will damage motivation and damage outcomes. For that reason, if not for sheer human decency, it cannot be tolerated.