Terms and Conditions

We reserve the right to make changes to these Terms and Conditions. Existing users will be given notice of any changes and additions to this contract 1 month (30 days) before the change is made. Notification of changes will be by way of display on our website and will become effective 30 days after the date of first publication. We may make grammatical or formatting changes at any time.

In the event that we make any changes to these Terms and Conditions to which you do not agree you must cease the use of all services before the date on which the changes come into effect and notify us accordingly. In such circumstances we will provide a pro-rata refund of any hosting fees paid at your last renewal.

SiteHQ® (referred hereinafter as 'SiteHQ.co.uk', ' SiteHQ', 'SiteHQ®', 'our', 'we' and 'us') is a web hosting service operated by Dark Group Ltd. SiteHQ® is the host, contact and service name for all users however 'Dark Group Ltd' and 'SiteHQ®' are interchangeable with this document.

All accounts on our web servers are subject to the terms and conditions described in this document and all conditions within apply equally to your use of our web space, email and support services.

Under the terms of this agreement, your placement of information on our servers or use of our email service is an acknowledgment that you have read, understand, and agree to the terms and conditions below:

1. The Service

a) The server your site is hosted on will remain the property of SiteHQ® at all times. Your account will be a 'virtual server' account and accordingly each SiteHQ® server is shared between users.

b) We reserve the absolute right to determine the maximum number of sites located on our servers in light of prevailing business needs and to meet our obligations to other clients.

c) We may need to relocate your account to a new server at any stage. We will attempt to provide advance notice of such need whenever foreseeable but you agree that we may action such transfers in light of prevailing business needs and to meet our obligations to other clients.

d) We make no claim or representation that our hosting services are PCI compliant or will pass any third party PCI compliance test. Certification of PCI compliance is subject to changing criteria and where a service previously successfully passes a compliance test we make no claim or representation that it will do so in future.

2. Account Conduct

a) If you intend to use your web space for any secure or confidential data, please email us to ensure we know of it's presence on our servers.

b) You may not upload any material which violates or infringes on the copyright, intellectual property rights or trademark rights of any individual or organization. You may upload these materials if you first obtain written permission from the copyright or trademark owner and we will require a copy of this permission before uploading.

This also applies to linking directly to illegal files or other sites that offer any illegal material. Sound and video files that you own the rights to may be uploaded only after you are approved. Midi files are unrestricted; you do not need approval for them.

c) The following cannot be held on our servers

3rd party copyrighted materials
Emulators
Gambling or gambling related site
Hacker programs
phpNuke or variants
Pirated software
Pornography or nudity of any kind
ROMs
Warez
any links/affiliations to the above

If any of the above is found in your account it will be deleted and you will be emailed with a warning. If a repeat offence is made, your account will be disabled with no refund given. If the initial breach of terms is strong enough your account will be immediately terminated. Deliberately changing the extension of a file to hide its contents will not work; it will be considered an illegal file and will result in the immediate termination of your account.

d) You may not publish any material that is grossly offensive to the general on-line community, including but not limited to, exploitation of children, blatant expressions of bigotry, hatred, harassment, defamation, invasion of privacy or excessive profanity (cursing). This includes material that defames, abuses, harasses or threatens any person or group.

Files or directories or email user accounts may NOT contain profane or sexually suggestive names or expletives.

e) These restrictions apply to all aspects of your account including web space, email and support account.

f) We reserve the right to be the final judge as to what is or is not acceptable and to terminate your account if your use of it causes a detrimental effect on other clients.

g) If your account is disabled due to illegal use on your part your domain name will remain your property, however a £25 + VAT charge will be levied should you wish to move the domain to another provider.

h) SiteHQ® will not be held responsible for the content of pages hosted under our service. We do not review page content before it is posted and do not verify, endorse, or otherwise take responsibility for the content of any user-created pages.

i) We reserve the right to remove any page from our servers which we determine is violating our rules and guidelines. Users are solely responsible for all files contained in their own directory, and can be held legally liable for the contents of their web site.

j) You must not attempt to gain illegal entry to our servers or run any intensive server-side tasks (any scripts which require more than 8Mb of server memory and/or more than 30 seconds of server time to execute) nor make excessive use of our autoresponders, subdomains and MySQL databases. Any over-use of these services may result in termination of your account. [see section 12]

k) Clients are solely responsible for ensuring that all scripts installed by them (including any available within your account panel) are patched and kept up to date.

l) Where your account causes any server outage we reserve the right to charge you for the time taken to investigate and return the server to use. Our charge is £20 + VAT per hour or part hour.

m) Your primary (first) email address at SiteHQ® is your account email address and any notifications and alerts we send to you will be to this address. It is your responsibility to check this address regularly for emails from SiteHQ®.

n) The amount of server space and bandwidth allocated to your account when you purchased it will always be the minimum value, however we may occasionally increase this value, in which case your account will be upgraded to the new values and you will be contacted regarding this change.

o) Should your account go over your alloted monthly bandwidth or space, you will be invoiced at our current prevailing rates for any excess usage.

p) SiteHQ® does not perform client backups and clients are advised to conduct regular backups of their accounts.

q) All users who install third party scripts agree to subscribe to the vendor's 'updates' mailing list/rss feed where available. If this facility is not available the user undertakes to check the vendor site on a regular basis for security announcements.

r) All script updates, patches and fixes relating to security issues must be applied within 72 hours of the vendor announcing their availability. If the update cannot be applied in this time the script must be closed to all site visitors until the script has been secured/updated.

3. Billing

a) We operate a paperless billing system. An email will be sent to the address you provide us during sign up every time an invoice is raised. If your email address changes it is your sole responsibility to update this information in your billing profile.

b) Your hosting account will be suspended if you fail to pay any invoice on time. If your account is suspended due to a billing issue, you will be charged an administration fee of £20.00 + VAT to have your account unsuspended. If you do not pay your invoice within 7 days of the due date we may terminate your account and any data stored will be lost.

c) In case where the customer has performed a 'charge back' without reason or without giving SiteHQ® sufficient time to deal with a problem legal action against the customer will be taken for any costs incurred by SiteHQ® and the account will be terminated with immediate effect.

d) All discount code applications are checked for validity. You will be told upon ordering whether it is valid. If it is valid, certain conditions may apply to it upon which you will be notified. Breach of these conditions will result in account suspension and you will not receive any refund at all. We reserve the right to obtain administration costs through legal action.

e) Discount codes are not applicable for domain names or account add-ons. They only apply for packages, and for the first year only. After that you will be charged the current price for package and domain renewal.

f) if you opt to pay via a recurring billing method such as credit/debit card or PayPal subscriptions you agree that you are solely responsible for canceling any service at least 24 hours before the invoice due date. Failure to cancel the service before the payment due date may result in you being invoiced. In such circumstances refunds will only be made at our sole discretion.

4. Bulk Email and Spam Policies

a) As responsible members of the global internet community, SiteHQ® operates a zero tolerance policy towards abuse, copyright theft and spam.

In an effort to reduce the prospect of our servers being used as the origination point of any spam (unsolicited email), users are restricted to sending 50 emails per account, per hour and contact forms on our Windows servers may only send email to domains hosted on the originating server.

b) The email system should not be used for mass transfer of data or for virus transfer. We have a zero-tolerance approach to spam mail being used by any of our members. If you are found to be sending spam your account will be terminated, no compensation will be given and you may be charged up to £1000 + VAT for your illegal use of spam. To help combat spam we limit users to sending 100 outbound emails per hourly session.

c) US based packages: Clients operating mailing lists are required to ensure that they include the ability for recipients to remove themselves from the list. This option must be available both on the client account and within the emails sent. Where we receive complaints of unsolicited emails or unactioned removal requests we may restrict or terminate your account.

d) UK based packages: It is strictly prohibited to send bulk emails from any UK based hosting account systems. Violations of this clause will result in the immediate termination of your account.

e) You may not send any unsolicited e-mail, whether commercial or non-commercial in nature, to any person who has indicated that they do not wish to receive it.

f) Cloud based packages: In order to help ensure prompt and successful email delivery without it being throttled or flagged as spam, we do not allow bulk mail to be sent from our mail servers and we do not support the automated sending of email (eg. web forms or transactional receipts). We consider bulk mail to be mail of identical or similar content sent to 250 or more addresses. This also includes the sending of the same or similar message more than 250 times to a single external email address (eg. a monitoring alert system). Breaking up mass mailings and sending them in smaller batches to intentionally avoid this restriction is also a violation of the AUP.

5. Domains

a) We make no representation that any domain name(s) you wish to register is capable of being registered by or for you or that it will be registered in your name. You should therefore not assume registration of your requested domain name(s) until you have been notified that it has or they have been registered. Any action taken by you before such notification is at your risk.

b) Registration of .uk domains signifies your acceptance of the additional terms and conditions imposed by Nominet which can be found here.

c) There is no charge to transfer your domain away from SiteHQ provided the request is received before any renewal is billed. Once renewal is billed an administration fee of £20 + VAT will be levied to cover the cancellation of the renewal invoice and cover any time assisting you with the transfer, including unlocking the domain.

6. Package Specific Terms

Pro, UK Pro and UK Hosting Accounts

In addition to the terms above the following conditions apply to all Pro, UK Pro and UK hosting accounts:

i. In addition to those listed at 2 (c) above unless we agree otherwise the following software and scripts may not be uploaded/installed on your account:

phpBB and any phpBB based scripts
SMF forum
JAB Guest Book
YaBB

ii. Forums must be configured with a minimum of 15 seconds between searches by the same user. Where the software allows the administrator to specify the minimum word length to include in searches this must be set to a minimum of four characters.

iii. To prevent overuse of server resources 'out of date' forum threads/posts should be archived where the forum software supports this facility. If this facility is not available and your forum impacts on server performance we may require that you prune posts over a specific age.

Windows Security Levels

All Windows services operate under Medium Trust, the preferred security level recommended by Microsoft for internet facing servers.

Cloud Hosting Accounts

In addition to our standard terms and conditions, the following terms apply to all CLOUD HOSTING plans, billing policies set out in this section take precedence over any others contained within this document.

a) Cloud hosting packages are billed monthly on a rolling basis. Either party may terminate the agreement by providing thirty days notice. You will be billed on the monthly anniversary and your account will be suspended if you fail to pay by the due date.

b) Provision of cloud hosting services may rely on services provided to us by external suppliers. In the event that we are no longer able to provide the service we will offer to locate your account on a physical shared hosting package or, if ceasation occurs within a billing period, a pro-rata refund of that period's fees.

c) You acknowledge that the resource values displayed on the sales page are not capped limits but allowances. We do not prevent your site exceeding those allowances and you are responsible for monitoring your resource usage via your hosting control panel and for all fees arising from the exceeding of these allowances. Overage fees will be invoiced at the end of your monthly billing period and will due on receipt. In the event that your overage fees reach £20 (ex VAT) before the end of a normal billing period we may require payment of these prior to your account billing date.

d) 4. We reserve the right to vary monthly and resource overage fees by giving 30 days notice.

e) Owing to the distributed nature of cloud hosting we do not guarantee the physical location of the server clusters operating the cloud service.

f) We do not make backups of any data stored on the cloud service. MySQL databases can be downloaded by the user via the phpMyAdmin interface. You agree that you have sole responsibility for retaining backups of your data on your local computer.

g) Cloud hosting packages cannot be used for any gambling related service and you may not operate any service distributing software to the public, providing a public file download service or employ programs that consume excessive CPU capacity. Our hosting service cannot be used a file hosting service.

h) You may not use Our Services to engage in illegal, abusive, or irresponsible behavior, including: · Unauthorized access to or use of data, systems or networks, including any attempt to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of a system or network or to breach security or authentication measures (including those belonging to Us and our Subscribers) without express authorization of the owner of the system or network; monitoring data or traffic on any network or system without the authorization of the owner of the system or network; Interference with service to any user, host or network including, without limitation, mail bombing, flooding, deliberate attempts to overload a system and broadcast attacks; Use of an Internet account or computer without the owner's authorization, including, but not limited to Internet scanning (tricking other people into releasing their passwords), password robbery, security hole scanning, and port scanning; Forging of any TCP-IP packet header or any part of the header information in an e-mail or a newsgroup posting; or Any conduct that is likely to result in retaliation against Our Services or network, including engaging in behavior that results in any server under your control being the target of a denial of service (DoS) attack.

i) You must have valid and current information on file with your domain name registrar for any domain hosted on Our network. Any actions which directly or indirectly result in Our IP space being listed in any of the various abuse databases may result in the immediate suspension or termination of your Services. You must use the Services in a manner that complies with applicable law. You may not use the Services for the development, design, manufacture, production, stockpiling, or use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, weapons of mass destruction, or missiles, in a country listed in Country Groups D:4 and D:3 of Supplement No. 1 to Part 740 of the United States Export Administration Regulations, and you may not provide access to the Services to any person (including any natural person, business entity or government entity) that is located in or is a national of any embargoed country which are Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan or Syria as of September, 2005.

7. Privacy Policy

a) SiteHQ® is committed to safeguarding the privacy of users while providing the highest possible quality of service.

We are registered with the (UK) Information Commissioner under the Data Protection Act 1998 under the name of our parent company, Dark Group Limited.

b) It is our policy that any information given to us by you is private and confidential. Accordingly, the personal information you provide to us is stored in a secure location, and is accessible only by designated staff. The server storing the data is located outside the European Economic Area however the processing of all data client data will at all times be subject to and in compliance with UK and EU laws. It will be used only for the purposes for which you provide the information.

We will not sell, rent or trade any personal information you provide to us. This information may be used for any correspondence with users including support calls, emails and the support forum.

c) In order to fulfill your domain registration and account creation, we need to know certain personal information collected at time of order and to use this information to register the domain(s) in your name. Some domain registrars make certain details available via a public record, commonly known as the WHOIS output.

Registration of non UK domains (for example .co.uk or .org.uk) will necessitate the transfer of your data outside of the European Economic Area. By requesting a domain registration you authorise us to share this information and agree to any use and display conditions imposed by the naming authorities.

d) Our computers are not set up to track, collect or distribute personal information about our visitors. They recognize the home server of visitors, but not e-mail addresses. For example, we can tell which Internet Service Provider our visitors use, but not the names, addresses or other information about our visitors that would allow us to identify the particular visitors to our sites.

In addition, our web sites track information about the visits to our web sites. For example, we compile statistics that show the daily number of visitors to our sites, the daily requests we receive for particular files on our web sites, and what countries those requests come from. These aggregated statistics are used internally to better provide services to the public, but again, the statistics contain no personal information and cannot be used to gather such information. During sign-up your computer's IP address will be recorded in case of credit card fraud on your part.

e) We will not pass any of your information to any third parties unless you have given prior permission to do so and we will email you periodically about new services and network news.

f) Please keep in mind that whenever you voluntarily disclose personal information on-line in guest books, message boards, through email, in chat, by entering contests, posting a contact reference on your website, etc. - that information can be collected and used by others.

In short, if you post personal information on-line that is accessible to the public, you may receive unsolicited messages that are completely beyond our control and responsibility. Ultimately, members are solely responsible for their actions when on-line, and for keeping their passwords, and all other personal information private.

8. Resellers

a) All resold accounts are subject to the Terms and Conditions agreed to by the SiteHQ® reseller and any changes made under clause 8.

b) Resellers shall indemnify Dark Group Limited and SiteHQ® against any and all losses suffered by their end users.

c) Resellers are responsible for ensuring that their own conditions fully reflect those of SiteHQ®. Where a resold account is in breach of our Terms and Conditions we will take all reasonable steps to contact the reseller requesting that they deal with the breach. However where this is not possible, or the situation requires immediate action, we reserve the right to suspend the resold account in question without prior notice.

d) The Reseller shall conduct their resold business in accordance with prevailing UK law and at all times comply with consumer legislation.

e) The Reseller remains at all times liable for the provision of support to their end users. When requesting assistance from SiteHQ® the reseller shall, in addition to such information as required under section 11, at all times provide a detailed and exhaustive account of any troubleshooting carried out by them.

9. Service Level Agreement

a) SiteHQ® guarantees a 99% uptime, you may request a refund of the purchase price (refunded in pro-rata) if this guarantee is not met over the course of 1 (one) annum.

Please note that appropriate statistical data must be produced by the user indicating that our server's uptime was less than 99% over the period in order to claim compensation. Planned downtime (of which you will be given 48 hours notice minimum) and downtime for emergency repairs are not included in this uptime guarantee.

10. Spam and Anti-Virus Checking

a) Responsibility for checking emails and files for viruses and for managing spam rests at all times with the account holder.

b) We may make available online versions of anti-spam and anti-virus tools via your control panel. Where we do so we give no warranty or assurance nor make any statement as to the performance of such software.

11. Support Policy

a) We will provide reasonable support to the named account holder to remedy any performance issue caused by our server or network. Unless requested by hard copy letter we will not provide support to any third party. Where we agree to do so the client will ensure that their agent's conduct will at all times comply with this document. Any breach of these conditions by the agent will be treated as if the breach were made by the client.

b) All support is provided via our online support portal, this includes all service announcements and updates which will be made on our announcements page. Under no circumstances will we provide any support by other means including, but not limited to, telephone or email.

c) We will respond to all support tickets strictly within the order of receipt. We aim to resolve all support issues within 24 hours of receiving all required details from the client however you acknowledge that there may be circumstances where resolution of any incident may exceed this period.

d) The client agrees to provide all relevant information when requesting support including, but not limited to:

full and exact wording of all error messages
details of how to replicate the reported issue
any and all usernames and passwords required to investigate
the URL of any specific page displaying the reported problem

where such information is not provided we reserve the right to close any support ticket pending receipt of the appropriate information.

e) Whilst we will sympathetically consider any requested configuration changes to allow a client to better use our services we are not obliged to make such changes and may decline to do so at our sole discretion and without obligation to provide a reason for doing so. At all times the security of our network and needs of our wider client base will take precedence over any requested changes.

f) Before opening a support ticket the client agrees to check our announcements page, and to make use of our knowledge base and support video tutorials which are accessible from the client area of our site. Where a ticket requests assistance for an issue addressed by these channels we reserve the right to close it, referring the client to the appropriate entry for assistance.

g) Our support obligations extend solely to remedying server derived faults. We cannot provide any assistance with scripting or web development issues. All issues arising from third party scripts should be referred to the script vendor.

h) Where we believe any support issue has arisen from any action or inaction by a client or third party we reasonably consider to be acting on the client's behalf we will charge for any time spent remedying the matter.

12. Account Termination

a) We may, at our sole discretion decline to renew any hosting package or service by giving notice of termination prior to the payment of the renewal invoice. Notice will be served by email or support ticket and sent to the email address listed in our billing system. The renewal date for clients paying monthly will be the monthly anniversary of their sign-up.

b) Yearly accounts will attract no refund should the account holder cancel their package during the 12 month period. This does not affect your rights of cancellation during the first 7 days of your account period where the purchase is a for non-commercial use.

c) We offer all personal (non-commercial) clients a 7 day cooling off period from your initial date of signup. No refunds are offered for any domain names purchased or transferred or any bespoke services such as secure certificates (SSL's) and we reserve the right to charge an administration fee. Accounts, including all data, emails and files, terminated under this offer shall be removed from our server immediately.

d) Accounts which we determine to present a detrimental effect on the quality of service enjoyed by other clients or are liable to damage our business name and reputation will be liable to termination without prior warning.

e) The client may cancel their account at any stage prior to the due date of any renewal invoice, upon the passing of the due date the client becomes liable for all sums invoiced. Cancelation requests must be made via our online ticketing system. Unless otherwise requested all terminations will be processed immediately.

13. Disclaimer

a) In no event will SiteHQ® be liable for any damages, including, without limitation, direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising out of the use of or inability to use SiteHQ® Web services or any content thereon.

This disclaimer applies, without limitation, to any damages or injury, whether for breach of contract, tort, or otherwise, caused by any failure of performance; error; omission; interruption; deletion; defect; delay in operation or transmission; computer virus; file corruption; communication line failure; network or system outage; or theft, destruction, unauthorized access to, alteration of, or use of any record.

b) Our total liability under this contract shall not exceed the annual cost of the hosting package purchased or renewed.

14. Transfer of Account

a) We may agree to the transfer of your account to a third party however such transfers are strictly at our discretion and we reserve the right to refuse to carry out any transfer. All transfer requests must be made in writing on the appropriate transfer form which can be obtained from our knowledge base.

b) We have the absolute right to terminate any account we believe not to operated by the original purchaser or approved transferee.

15. Applicability and Acceptance of These Terms

Proceeding with your or renewal order verifies your acceptance of these conditions which supercede all other terms previously agree between ourselves. Your order has not been accepted by SiteHQ® until you have received your account details.

This policy corresponds to all SiteHQ® hosting packages and services. All contracts and agreements entered into are governed by English law.

16. Complaints Handling

You can find our complaints handling procedure at www.dg.co.uk/complaints.