ToS/AUP/survival guide in plain English

[Admin]

Hello !

We often get questions about specific issues detailed in the ToS/AUP. Because those are in legalese, few people can read them correctly, so here it is a plain English version.

Extremely short version:

Don't be a dick and know your rights and obligations, we will treat you as a valued customer with discounts or special offers as well as free products !

Regular Version

You have the right to the following:

1. Your data full privacy. This means we will not disclose it to any third party without a proper warrant. We ask you to place any queries and requests in the billing panels while signed in. We do not take action even in emergency without making sure you are the account owner. We might come across some data while investigating service disruption due to hacking or illegal/abusive activities. At most we will suspend the services if we found a violation of the ToS/AUP.
2. Limited support. While our services are unmanaged, we do, at least, point you to some tutorials we or others wrote. At times, as time allows, we perform some limited action to give you back access, if everything else fails (console access, tutorials, etc). There are no guarantees for this, though. You can request a quote if you need us to do something for you, we will do it after the payment in most cases.
3. While our official policy is stating bluntly "no refunds" we fully refund if you couldn't use the service due to some issue at our end, or it wasn't fully functional within 24 hours since payment. If the customer changes his mind or requests a refund for other reasons on his side, we do a pro-rated refund retaining the paypal fees and taxes to the Italian/UK/US/Indian governments. This means about 10 % but it depends on amounts, smaller amounts have higher fees and taxes proportionally. This is because it is not right that we pay for the customer's mistake.
4. Your service should be uninterrupted. While we do all we can towards this goal (we have multiple network redundancies and others built-in our cloud services), we currently offer not SLA to our non-corporate customers (those that have no specially signed contract). We try to perform maintenance without interruption, but that is not possible outside the cloud for many tasks, so interruptions will happen, and on OVZ this also happened because node kernel crashes in some situations. We monitor the service for abuse 24/7, automatically and manually, yet, we cannot rule out short (5-10 min) packet loss during heavy DDoS, for example. The recurrence of these is on a sharp decline though, and it usually affects small segments at a time, so the chance your service will suffer is really low while for the Biz plans it is much lower still due to some known DDoS magnets and services which can easily abuse cpu/network such as games/p2p not being allowed there.
5. We do not charge you for going over the resources allocated for the plan. We will simply throttle, shutdown or suspend the service. There are no "fines" for any action we will simply terminate the service and close your account if you abuse it.
There are no late fees nor minimal contract periods, you can cancel at any time, in most cases (barring abuse) we provide a pro-rated refund upon request (fees and taxes are deducted, though).
Please do not compare us with other providers Prometeus/Iperweb ARE different !

You have the following obligations:

1. Provide the correct data at sign-up. We reserve the right to deny service to people which we have reasons to believe are not doing so or are using proxies. This is because it is illegal in Italy to provide anonymous service and the authorities are really enforcing this. We do not sell your data nor use it in advertising except our monthly newsletters of which you can easily opt-out.
2. Pay the fees with own money. We do check transactions of the new customers and decide to deny service on a case-by-case basis if you do not use your verified account to do so.
3. Secure your VPS/scripts well. Our services are unmanaged, we consider our customers know what they are doing and all the abuse coming from their IPs is done by them. So, please be careful, we have a few basic security tutorials here, read them at least.
4. Use only one account per person. Share your password with nobody, we will not accept this as an excuse when abuse comes from your IP. If you give access to your vps you should be prepared to face the consequences of the activities of the person you gave access to. Also, do not give proxy access or email accounts to people you do not trust. They will be used for illegal activities in most cases and you will be facing the consequences. Open proxies (no authentication required) are strictly forbidden, no matter the justification.
5. Not all services come with the same rules. The Biz ones are intended for critical applications and as such we do not allow there any service that can create disruptions such as IRC, gameservers, P2P (such as bittorrrent), videochat (camfrog and similar apps). The following are not allowed on ANY of our services:
- Camfrog and similar videochat software;
- Bitcoin and similar mining, "grid computing", etc;
- Open Proxies;
- Tor Exit nodes;
- Other illegal activities, such as sharing cards for coded TV channels.
Biz plans forbid, in addition tot he above the following:
-Any kind of gameserver;
-Any kind of IRC;
-Any kind of P2P file-sharing;
-Any kind of Tor node.
6. Please remember you are in a shared environment and you should not use more than your fair share except in clear situations.
We allow bursting over your fair share of CPU (loads higher than the number of cores) for short periods on the regular (Pro) plans and for much longer time on the Biz plans, but this does not mean you can make it a habit. We understand sudden spikes in popularity and sudden load of your game server but if it lasts for more than a few hours on Pro plans and more than a day on Biz plans, then it is a time for upgrades. No bursting is allowed on the budget plans (OVerZold/XenPower), you are allowed to use the maximum of your plan's resources without going over at any time on those low-cost plans. Abusers will have their server shutdown, limited or suspended at our sole judgement. Do not host critical applications on budget plans, we are not responsible if your VPS starts abusing the node's resources and will be shutdown. You will get a notice about it being shutdown only. If this is happening more than a couple of times it will be suspended indefinitely.
7. We recently started offering DDoS protected IPs on most services, therefore there is no excuse if you get targeted by an attack. If it happens a second time and you still didn't get a DDoS protected service, your service will be terminated. Our DDoS protection service is reasonably priced, (9 Eur per month per IP) so it is not right that we suffer from the attacks against you.

Payment.

We issue invoices a few days at least before due time and keep the service running a couple of days after it, but it is suspended afterwards. After a varying delay, the service will be terminated and the invoice cancelled which makes data irretrievable. We consider that, if you didnt notice your VPS has been off-service for a few days, you do not have important data/applications there. Once a service has been terminated, please do not insist for restoration, all the information on it has been lost for good.
We accept paypal payments payza and skrill, but the latter ones are only with experimental title while in bank transfers cases, you will have to pay all the associated fees. If additional fees are incurred due to usage of those alternative means, they will be paid by the customer in full.
We are not responsible for your paypal being blocked/limited, but we can understand these situations and, if notified in advance, can extend the service for a week or even more for known and old customers.
We are not responsible for overpayments. If that happens (for example because you forgot to cancel the paypal subscription or you paid manually too, on top of that) we will refund you on request, but will retain the fees/taxes as stated above. If you use the credit to buy other services or pay future invoices, then there is no penalty, of course.
EU customers without a valid VAT ID will pay a 22 % VAT tax to the Italian government (subject to change as the law changes).

Services not included:

1. Back-ups. We do not take backups of your data unless otherwise stated and, even then, the backups are taken for disaster recovery situations, we do not restore your individual VPS unless for a fee. We provide free FTP backup space to all customers, some benefit even from SSH access and http(s) depending on your plan. There is no excuse if you do not have recent backups, even for the services where we do keep ours for disaster recovery, those might not be recent enough for you, are only intended to get your vps running until you can restore the data from your own, more recent back-ups.
2. Assistance. We do have a few tutorials and will put up more, we may even point you to some off-site ones, but we will not hold your hand teaching you linux administration or your specific application/script administration. We can do it but only for a fee unless in special cases.
3. Securing your VPS/application. If you are hacked, except when our billing/vps control panels are hacked, it is your sole responsibility. We are not making the linux kernel and any of the applications you use, not to mention the windows ones, we only offer you the VPS (like a computer) and you have the full responsibility to protect it. If you do not maintain your VPS's OS applications at least to keep them updated, they WILL be hacked, it is just a question of time. We do not accept responsibility for it, the same way we do not accept responsibility for your home computer infection.