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Terms Of Use
The use of
services from TopNotchCreations.com, [hereafter referred to as
"Top Notch Creations"] constitutes agreement to these terms.
1.) Account Setup / Email on file
We will setup your
account after we have received payment and we and/or our payment
partner(s) have screened the order(s) incase of fraud. It is your
responsibility to provide us with an email address which is not @ the
domain(s) you are signing up under. 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. It is your responsibility to ensure the email address
on file is current or up to date at all times. Providing false contact
information of any kind may result in the termination of your account.
In dedicated server purchases or high risk transactions, it will be
necessary to provide government issued identification and possibly a
scan of the credit card used for the purchase. If you fail to meet
these requirements, the order may be considered fraudulent in nature
and be denied.
Transfers
Our transfers team
will make every effort to help you move your site to us. However,
transfers are provided as a courtesy service, and we can not make
guarantees regarding the availability, possibility, or time required to
complete an account transfer. Each hosting company is configured
differently, and some hosting platforms save data in an incompatible or
proprietary format, which may make it extremely difficult if not
impossible to migrate some or all account data. We will try our best,
but in some cases we may be unable to assist you in a transfer of data
from an old host.
The free transfer
services are available for 30 days from your signup date. Transfers
outside of the 30 day free period will incur a charge; please contact a
member of the transfers department with specific details to receive a
price quote.
2.) Content
All services
provided by Top Notch Creations may only be used for lawful purposes.
The laws of the State of Florida, the State of Texas, and the United
States of America apply.
The customer
agrees to indemnify and hold harmless Top Notch Creations from
any claims resulting from the use of our services.
Use of our
services to infringe upon any copyright or trademark is prohibited.
This includes but is not limited to unauthorized copying of music,
books, photographs, or any other copyrighted work. The offer of sale of
any counterfeit merchandise of a trademark holder will result in the
immediate termination of your account. If you believe that your
copyright or trademark is being infringed upon, please email abuse@topnotchcreations.com with the information required.
Examples of unacceptable material on all Shared and Reseller servers include:
IRC Bots, Proxy
Scripts / Anonymizers, Pirated Software / Warez, image, filedump,
mirror, or banner-ad services (similar to rapidshare, photobucket, or
commercial banner ad rotation), affiliate servers, topsites, commercial
audio streaming (more than one or two streams), Escrow, High-Yield
Interest Programs (HYIP) or related sites, Investment sites (FOREX,
egold exchange), sale of any controlled substance without prior proof
of appropriate permit(s), AutoSurf sites, Bank Debentures, Bank
Debenture Trading Programs, Prime Banks Programs, lottery sites, muds /
rpg's, hate sites, hacker focused sites/archives/programs, or sites
promoting illegal activities, IP Scanners, Brute Force Programs, Mail
Bombers and Spam Scripts. Forums and or websites that distribute or
link to warez content are prohibited.
Using a shared account as a backup/storage device is not permitted, with the exception of one cPanel backup of the same account.
Examples of unacceptable material on Dedicated servers include:
Pirated Software /
Warez, Escrow, High-Yield Interest Programs (HYIP) or related sites,
Investment sites (FOREX, egold exchange), sale of any controlled
substance without prior proof of appropriate permit(s), AutoSurf sites,
Bank Debentures, Bank Debenture Trading Programs, Prime Banks Programs,
lottery sites, hate sites, hacker focused sites/archives/programs, or
sites promoting illegal activities, IP Scanners, Brute Force Programs,
Mail Bombers and Spam Scripts. Forums and or websites that distribute
or link to warez content are prohibited.
Top Notch
Creations services, including all related equipment, networks and
network devices are provided only for authorized customer use. Top
Notch Creations systems may be monitored for all lawful purposes,
including to ensure that use is authorized, for management of the
system, to facilitate protection against unauthorized access, and to
verify security procedures, survivability and operational security.
During monitoring, information may be examined, recorded, copied and
used for authorized purposes. Use of Top Notch Creations system(s)
constitutes consent to monitoring for these purposes.
We reserve the
right to refuse service to anyone. Any material that, in our judgment,
is obscene, threatening, illegal, or violates our terms of service in
any manner may be removed from our servers (or otherwise disabled),
with or without notice.
Failure to respond
to 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 troubleticket/email and will have a response within 48
hours.
If in doubt
regarding the acceptability of your site or service, please contact us
at abuse@topnotchcreations.com 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 (Lolita):
Any site found to host child pornography or linking to child pornography will be suspended immediately without notice.
Resellers: we will
suspend the site in question and will notify you so you may terminate
the account. We will further monitor your activity; more than one
infraction of this type may result in the immediate termination of your
account.
Direct customers: Your services will be terminated with or without notice.
Violations will be reported to the appropriate law enforcement agency.
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 username
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
We take a zero
tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited e-mail, bulk emailing,
and spam. "Safe lists" and "double opt-in" 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.
Top Notch
Creations 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.
Top Notch
Creations reserves the right to charge the holder of the account used
to send any unsolicited e-mail a clean up fee. This cost of the clean
up fee is entirely at the discretion of Top Notch Creations.
4.) Payment Information
You agree to
supply appropriate payment for the services received from Top Notch
Creations, in advance of the time period during which such services are
provided. You agree that until and unless you notify Top Notch
Creations of your desire to cancel any or all services received, those
services will be billed on a recurring basis.
Cancellations must be done in writing via e-mail.Once
we receive your cancellation and have confirmed all necessary
information with you via e-mail, we will inform you in writing
(typically email) that your account has been canceled. Your
cancellation confirmation will contain a ticket/tracking number in the
subject for your reference, and for verification purposes. You should
immediately receive an automatic "Your request has been received..."
email with a tracking number. An employee will confirm your request
(and process your cancellation) shortly thereafter. If you do not hear
back from us, or do not receive the automatic confirmation email within
a few minutes after submitting your cancellation, please contact us
immediately.
We require that
cancellations of service are done through the online process to (a)
confirm your identity, (b) confirm in writing you are prepared for all
files/emails to be removed, and (c) document the request. This process
reduces the likelyhood of mistakes, fraudulent/malicious requests, and
ensures you are aware that the files, emails, and account may be
removed immediately after a cancellation request is processed.
As a client of Top
Notch Creations, it is your responsibility to ensure that your payment
information is up to date, and that all invoices are paid on time. Top
Notch Creations provides a 10 day grace period from the time the
invoice is due and when it must be paid. Any invoice that is overdue
for 10 days and not paid will result in a $10 late fee and/or an
account suspension until account balance has been paid in full.
Invoices that have
been paid more than once with multiple Paypal Subscriptions can only be
added as credit towards the account and cannot be refunded via Paypal.
If you require assistance with this provision, please contact sales@topnotchcreations.com
Top Notch Creations reserves the right to change the monthly payment amount and any other charges at anytime.
5.) Backups and Data Loss
Your use of the
service is at your sole risk. Top Notch Creations is not responsible
for files and/or data residing on your account. You agree to take full
responsibility for files and data transferred and to maintain all
appropriate backup of files and data stored on Top Notch Creations
servers.
6.) Cancellations and Refunds
Top Notch Creations reserves the right to cancel the account at any time with or without notice.
Any abuse of our staff in any medium or format will result in the suspension or termination of your services.
Customers may cancel at any time via e-mail.Top
Notch Creations gives you an unconditional 45 day money back guarantee
on managed shared hosting, and reseller solutions for any customer who
paid the first invoice with a credit card or with Paypal.
The following methods of payments are non-refundable, and refunds will be posted as credit to the hosting account:
Bank Wire Transfers
Western Union Payments
Checks
Money orders
There are no
refunds on dedicated servers, administrative fees, install fees for
custom software, or domain name purchases. Refund requests for shared
and reseller accounts after the initial 45 days will be refunded on a
prorated basis of any unused time.
Only first-time
accounts are eligible for a refund. For example, if you've had an
account with us before, canceled and signed up again, you will not be
eligible for a refund or if you have opened a second account with us.
Violations of the Terms of Service will waive the refund policy.
7a.) Resource Usage
User may not:
a) Use 25% 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.
b) Run
stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on
the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
c) Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy) on shared servers.
d) Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
e) 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.
f) Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities
g) Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc
h) Run cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes
When using PHP
include functions for including a local file, include the local file
rather than the URL. Instead of
include("http://yourdomain.com/include.php") use include("include.php")
7b.) INODES
The use of more
than 50,000 inodes on any shared account may potentially result in
suspension. Accounts found to be exceeding the 50,000 inode limit will
automatically be removed from our backup system to avoid overusage.
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
8.) Bandwidth Usage
You are allocated
a monthly bandwidth allowance. This allowance varies depending on the
hosting package you purchase. Should your account pass the allocated
amount we reserve the right to suspend the account until the start of
the next allocation, suspend the account until more bandwidth is
purchased at an additional fee, suspend the account until you upgrade
to a higher level of package, terminate the account and/or charge you
an additional fee for the overages. Unused transfer in one month cannot
be carried over to the next month.
9a.) Money back Guarantee
On dedicated
servers and colocation no full refund will be honored -- the 30 day
money back guarantee does not apply. We reserve the right to refund a
prorated amount or no refund at all.
Each of Top Notch
Creations managed shared and reseller servers carry a 30 day
unconditional money back guarantee on them. If you are not completely
satisfied with our services within the first 30 days of your service,
you will be given a full refund of the contract amount. Remember, this
is only for monthly shared or reseller packages and does not apply to
dedicated servers, administrative fees, install fees for custom
software, or domain name purchases.
9b.) Uptime Guarantee
If your shared /
reseller server has a physical downtime that is not within the 99.9%
uptime you may receive one month of credit on your account. Approval of
the credit is at the discretion of HostGator dependant upon
justification provided. Third party monitoring service reports may not
be used for justification due to a variety of factors including the
monitor's network capacity/transit availability. The uptime of the
server is defined as the reported uptime from the operating system and
the Apache Web Server which may differ from the uptime reported by
other individual services. To request a credit, please contact
sales@topnotchcreations.com with justification. All requests must be
made in writing via email. Uptime guarantees only apply to shared /
reseller solutions. Dedicated servers are covered by a network
guarantee in which the credit is prorated for the amount of time the
server is down which is not related to our uptime guarantee.
10.) Reseller: Client Responsibility
Resellers are
responsible for supporting their clients. Top Notch Creations does not
provide support to our Reseller's Clients. If a reseller's client
contacts us, we reserve the right to place the client account on hold
until the reseller can assume their responsibility for their client.
All support requests must be made by the reseller on their clients'
behalf for security purposes. Resellers are also responsible for all
content stored or transmitted under their reseller account and the
actions of their clients'. Top Notch Creations will hold any reseller
responsible for any of their clients actions that violate the law or
the terms of service.
11.) Shared (non-reseller accounts) / Semidedicated Servers
Shared accounts
may not resell web hosting to other people, if you wish to resell
hosting you must use a reseller account. Semidedicated servers are not
backed up. You must maintain your own backups.
12.) Dedicated Servers
Top Notch
Creations reserves the right to reset the password on a dedicated
server if the password on file is not current so that we may do
security audits as required by our datacenter. It is the responsibility
of the client to ensure that there is a valid email address and current
root password on file for their dedicated server on file to prevent
downtime from forced password resets. Top Notch Creations
reserves the right to audit servers as needed and to perform
administrative actions at the request of our datacenter. Dedicated
servers are NOT backed up by us and it is the responsibility of the
client to maintain backups or have a solution for this. You may
purchase an additional hard drive and maintain backups to it as the
most simple solution. Please contact sales@topnotchcreations.com if you
wish to obtain a secondary hard drive. It is your responsibility to
maintain backups.
13.) Price Change
The amount you pay
for hosting will never increase from the date of purchase. We reserve
the right to change prices listed on topnotchcreations.com, and the
right to increase the amount of resources given to plans at any time.
14a.) Indemnification
Customer agrees
that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold Top Notch Creations
harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and
claims, including reasonable attorney's fees asserted against Top Notch
Creations, 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, its agents, employees or
assigns. Customer agrees to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Top
Notch Creations against liabilities arising out of; (1) any injury to
person or property caused by any products sold or otherwise distributed
in connection with Top Notch Creations; (2) any material supplied by
customer infringing or allegedly infringing on the proprietary rights
of a third party; (3) copyright infringement and (4) any defective
products sold to customers from Top Notch Creations server.
14b.) Arbitration
By using any Top
Notch Creations services, you agree to submit to binding arbitration.
If any disputes or claims arise against Top Notch Creations or its
subsidiaries, such disputes will be handled by an arbitrator of Top
Notch Creations choice. An arbitrator from the American Arbitration
Association or the National Arbitration Forum will be selected in the
state of Texas. Arbitrators shall be attorneys or retired judges and
shall be selected pursuant to the applicable rules. All decisions
rendered by the arbitrator will be binding and final. The arbitrator's
award is final and binding on all parties. The Federal Arbitration Act,
and not any state arbitration law, governs all arbitration under this
Arbitration Clause. You are also responsible for any and all costs
related to such arbitration.
15.) Disclaimer
Top Notch
Creations shall not be responsible for any damages your business may
suffer. Top Notch Creations makes no warranties of any kind, expressed
or implied for services we provide. Top Notch Creations disclaims any
warranty or merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This
includes loss of data resulting from delays, no deliveries, wrong
delivery, and any and all service interruptions caused by Top Notch
Creations and its employees.
16.) Disclosure to law enforcement
Top Notch
Creations may disclose any subscriber information to law enforcement
agencies without further consent or notification to the subscriber upon
lawful request from such agencies.
We will cooperate fully with law enforcement agencies.
17.) Changes to the TOS
Top Notch Creations reserves the right to revise its policies at any time without notice.
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