This Acceptable Use Policy sets out the terms between you and us under which you may use the hosting services we provide (“Hosting Services” or “Services”). Your use of the Hosting Services means that you accept, and agree to abide by, all the policies in this Acceptable Use Policy, which supplement our Terms and Conditions.

1. Contact Details

It is your responsibility to ensure that the email address on your account is current or up to date at all times. Providing false contact information of any kind may result in the termination of your account. It may be preferable to use an email address which is not @ the domain(s) you have hosted with us.

If there is ever an abuse issue or we need to contact you, the primary email address on file will be used for this purpose. Failure to respond to an email from our abuse department within 48 hours may result in the suspension or termination of your services. All abuse issues must be dealt with via the support ticket system and will have a response within 48 hours.

2. Content

All Services provided by us may only be used for lawful purposes, in accordance with English Law.

Use of our Services to infringe upon any copyright or trademark is prohibited. This includes but is not limited to unauthorised copying of music, books, photographs, or any other copyrighted work. Any account found to be in violation of another’s copyright will be suspended, or access to the material disabled. The offer for sale of any counterfeit merchandise of a trademark holder will result in the immediate termination of your account.

Any account found to be in repeated violation of copyright laws will be suspended and/or terminated from our Hosting Services. If you believe that your copyright or trademark is being infringed upon, please Contact Us.

Using the Hosting Services as a backup/storage device is not permitted, with the exception of one cPanel backup of the same account. Please do not take backups of your backups.

Examples of unacceptable material include, but are not limited to:

• Topsites
• IRC Scripts/Bots
• Proxy Scripts/Anonymisers
• Pirated Software/Warez
• Image Hosting Scripts (similar to Photobucket or Tinypic)
• AutoSurf/PTC/PTS/PPC sites
• IP Scanners
• Bruteforce Programs/Scripts/Applications
• Mail Bombers/Spam Scripts
• Banner-Ad services (commercial banner ad rotation)
• File Dump/Mirror Scripts (similar to rapidshare)
• Commercial Audio Streaming (more than one or two streams)
• Escrow/Bank Debentures
• High-Yield Interest Programs (HYIP) or Related Sites
• Investment Sites (FOREX, E-Gold Exchange, Second Life/Linden Exchange, Ponzi, MLM/Pyramid Scheme)
• Sale of any controlled substance without prior proof of appropriate license and authorisation
• Prime Banks Programs
• Lottery Sites
• MUDs/RPGs/PPBGs
• Hateful/Racist/Harassment oriented sites
• Hacker focused sites/archives/programs
• Sites promoting illegal activities
• Forums and/or websites that distribute or link to warez/pirated/illegal content
• Bank Debentures/Bank Debenture Trading Programs
• Fraudulent Sites (including, but not limited to sites listed at aa419.org and escrow-fraud.com)
• Mailer Pro

If you are in any doubt regarding the acceptability of your site or content, please contact us via the support ticket system and we will be happy to assist you.

Potential harm to minors is strictly forbidden, including but not limited to child pornography or content perceived to be child pornography. Any site found to host child pornography or linking to child pornography will be suspended immediately without notice and the appropriate authorities informed.

Any material that, in our judgment, is obscene, threatening, illegal, or violates our Terms and Conditions of service in any manner may be removed from our servers (or otherwise disabled), with or without notice.

It is your responsibility to ensure that scripts/programs installed under your account are secure and permissions of directories are set properly, regardless of installation method. When at all possible, set permissions on most directories to 755 or as restrictive as possible. Users are ultimately responsible for all actions taken under their account. This includes the compromise of credentials such as user name and password. It is required that you use a secure password. If a weak password is used, your account may be suspended until you agree to use a more secure password. Audits may be done to prevent weak passwords from being used. If an audit is performed, and your password is found to be weak, we will notify you and allow time for you to change/update your password.

3. Zero Tolerance Spam Policy – Please read this carefully!

We take a zero tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited email, bulk emailing, and spam. “Safe lists” and purchased lists will be treated as spam. Any user who sends out spam will have their account terminated with or without notice.

Sites advertised via SPAM (Spamvertised) 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. Any account which results in our IP space being blacklisted will be immediately suspended and/or terminated.

Free Website Hosting UK reserves the right to charge the holder of the account used to send any unsolicited email a “clean up” fee, including any charges incurred in blacklist removal. The cost of the “clean up” fee is entirely at the discretion of Free Website Hosting UK.

4. Email Limits

There is a 500 email limit per hour per domain. If you try to send more than this amount in any hour, most of the e-mails will bounce back with an undeliverable error.

Our servers have a limit of 60 POP3/IMAP checks per hour per email address. If you go over this you’re likely to get a wrong password error message or an error stating “login incorrect”. If this occurs you will automatically be locked out, so please wait an hour and try again. To prevent this from happening, please make sure to disable auto checking or at least set the interval to something higher such as once every 10 minutes.

5. Mailing List Rules

a. Throttling
Any time you’re sending a message, no matter how large your email list is, you must throttle it. We recommend you throttle it to (at the very least) sending 1 email every 6 seconds. If the mailing list software you’re using does not allow you to throttle sending you must switch to an application or script that will. We recommend PHPList, which can be found in your cPanel under Fantastico. If you do not throttle and you try sending 500 emails, the server will try sending all 500 in 1 second which is not possible. This will cause an excessively high load on the server and the entire server will be sluggish until this sending process is completed. It is our job to ensure that the server is running effectively, without being sluggish, for the benefit of all users. Any account that causes the server load to increase in this manner will be suspended and the process will be terminated. If you choose not to throttle your messages you will most likely be suspended for crashing the server.

b. List Size
Any mailing list larger than 5,000 email addresses will require a dedicated hosting solution from us. Note: dividing one large list into smaller lists to get below this limit is not allowed. Any mailing list with over 900 email addresses is only allowed to be sent during set times to prevent high server loads. These times are between 7am – 4pm GMT Monday to Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday.

c. Double Opt-In
The list must be a Double Opt-In list. This means a user has subscribed for a newsletter or other email marketing messages by explicitly requesting it and confirming the email address to be their own. Confirmation is usually done by responding to a notification/confirmation email sent to the email address the end user specified. The Double Opt-In method eliminates the chance of abuse where somebody submits someone else’s email address without their knowledge and against their will. You will not be permitted to mail any mailing list that you were given or purchased. In doing so, this will also be considered spamming and may result in termination of the offending account.

d. Guidelines
Any mailing list MUST comply with the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. However, the CAN SPAM regulations are internationally accepted and we strongly recommend that these are used.

e. SMTP Mailers
No direct SMTP mailers are allowed. An example of this would be a Darkmailer or The Bat!. Any mail should be sent through the local mail server/MTA for further delivery by the server and not done directly by scripts. Free Website Hosting UK reserves the right to require changes or disable as necessary any web site, account, database, or other component that does not comply with its established policies, or to make any such modifications in an emergency at its sole discretion.

6. Resource Usage

You may not:

• Use 15% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.
• Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
• Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy).
• Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
• 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 servers.
• Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities.
• Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc.
• Run cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes.

Note: When using PHP include functions for including a local file, include the local file rather than the URL. e.g. use include(“include.php”) instead of include(“http://yourdomain.com/include.php”)

7. Inodes

The use of more than 250,000 inodes on any account may result in a warning, and if no action is taken, possible suspension. Every file (e.g. a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode. Sites that temporarily exceed our inode limits by a small amount 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 is usually due to users leaving their catchall email 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.

8. Bandwidth Usage

You are allocated a monthly bandwidth allowance. This allowance varies depending on the hosting plan you purchase. Should your account pass the allocated amount we reserve the right to: (i) suspend the account until the start of the next allocation; (ii) suspend the account until more bandwidth is purchased at an additional fee; or (iii) suspend the account until you upgrade to a higher level plan. Unused transfer in one month cannot be carried over to the next month.

9. Staff Abuse

Any abuse of our staff in any medium or format will result in the suspension or termination of your account.