Words defined in our  Terms and Conditions shall have the same meaning in this acceptable use policy.

1. Prohibited uses

You may use our site or the services we provide only for lawful purposes. You may not use our site or services:

• In any way that breaches any applicable local, national or international law or regulation;
• In any way that is unlawful or fraudulent, or has any unlawful or fraudulent purpose or effect;
• For the purpose of harming or attempting to harm minors in any way;
• To transmit, or procure the sending of, any unsolicited or unauthorised advertising or promotional material or any other form of similar solicitation (spam);
• To knowingly transmit any data, send or upload any material that contains viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time-bombs, keystroke loggers, spyware, adware or any other harmful programs or similar computer code designed to adversely affect the operation of any computer software or hardware;
• To send, knowingly receive, upload, download, use or re-use any material which:

• is defamatory of any person;
• is obscene, offensive, hateful or inflammatory;
• promotes sexually explicit material;
• promotes violence;
• promotes discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age;
• infringes any copyright, database right, trade mark or other intellectual property right of any other person;
• is likely to deceive any person;
• is made in breach of any legal duty owed to a third party such as a contractual duty or a duty of confidence;
• promotes any illegal activity;
• is threatening, abusive or invades another’s privacy, or causes annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety;
• is likely to harass, upset, embarrass, alarm or annoy any other person;
• advertises for sale substances that are legal in law but are known to be abused;
• is used to impersonate any person, or to misrepresent your identity or affiliation with any person; or gives the impression that it emanate from us if this is not the case.

You also agree not to access without authority, interfere with, damage or disrupt:

• any part of our site;
• any equipment or network on which our site is stored;
• any software used in the provision of our site; or
• any equipment or network or software owned or used by any third party.

You may not register for an account with us or sign up or use our services for the purposes of testing or vetting security measures in any way or format without our express written consent to do so.

2. Resource usage

The purpose of the web hosting space provided is for use with web hosting and all files uploaded or stored must comply with this requirement and be visible and accessible to end users visiting the web site or domain.

Hippo Hosting plans are designed to host most personal, small business and organisation websites, and so we offer some plans with unlimited bandwidth and some plans offer unlimited disk space and websites. This means that we do not set a limit on the amount of bandwidth, websites or disk space you may use in the operation of your website, provided it complies with this acceptable usage policy and our terms and conditions of service.

Hippo hosting plans, to include plans classed as unlimited shall be subject to the following limits:

For our Linux hosted plans, there is a limit of no more than 250,000 inodes per account.

Linux hosting plans may not consume more than the resources allocated for each packages. These can be viewed in Customer Account area and your web control panel. Should these resources be exceeded your web site may slow down or content may not be served until more resources are provided, which may be available for additional fees.

Hosting plans which are advertised and/or sold as WordPress Hosting plans are provided on systems specifically optimised for WordPress hosting and so may only be used to host a WordPress site.  Should the hosting plan be found to host or contain a non-WordPress web site and/or content a warning may be issued and you will be required to remove the non-WordPress content or you may be required to change to an appropriate hosting plan should this continue.

In the event the bandwidth, number of websites or disk space usage of your website presents a risk to the stability, performance or uptime of our servers, data storage, networking or other infrastructure, you may be required to upgrade your account to our Hippo Business Pro, Hippo VPS or Hippo Dedicated, or we may take action to restrict the resources your website is utilising.

3. Website Content

The web hosting space will not be used as a file storage method for purposes other than serving content for your web site and in any event may not contain the following content;

• Warez’ content or content commonly known to be pirated or illegal copies of software or other works;
• MP3’s or other audio formats of copyrighted music;
• Movie downloads in any format whether complete or in part;
• Pornographic material;
• Any content that is illegal under UK or European law;
• Image hosting scripts that allow an anonymous user to upload an image for display on another website;
• Banner advertising services for display on other websites or devices (commercial banner advertisement rotation);
• File dump/mirror scripts that allow anonymous users to upload a file for others to download;
• Commercial audio streaming (more than one or two streams);
• Push button mail scripts that allow the end user to specify recipient email addresses;
• Anonymous or bulk SMS gateways;
• Backups of content from a computer or website;
• Bittorrent trackers
• Any script that causes a degradation in the performance of our server or network environment;

We reserve the right to serve notice to suspend service, suspend service, or remove any files which do not comply with these rules.

4. Excessive Use of Resources or Network Abuse

You may not consume excessive amounts of server or network resources or use the Services in any way which results in server performance issues or which interrupts service for other customers. Prohibited activities that contribute to excessive use, include without limitation:

• Hosting or linking to an anonymous proxy server;
• Operating a file sharing site;
• Scripts or processes that adversely impact our systems; or
• Utilising software that interfaces with an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network.

5. Unauthorised System Access

You may not directly or indirectly use the Services to gain access to any network or system without permission, including without limitation:

Accessing another network without permission, including to probe or scan for vulnerabilities or breach security or authentication measures;

Attacking other networks (e.g., utilising botnets or other means to launch Denial of Service (DoS) or other attacks);

Intercepting or monitoring data without permission; or

Using any deep-link, page-scrape, robot, crawl, index, spider, offline reader, click spam, macro programs, internet agent, or other automatic device, program, algorithm or methodology, to use, access, copy, index, acquire information, generate impressions or clicks, input information, store information, search, generate searches, or monitor any portion of Hipposerve’s website or servers for any unauthorised purpose.

6. Storage of Backups

• You may not use your hosting account as a backup solution. Our Services are designed to host your website only and may not be used as a data repository. Hipposerve reserves the right to remove backups from your hosting account with or without notice. 
  
• Hipposerve offers a dedicated offsite backup solution for all backup purposes.

7. Mass Mailing

Mass mailing is not allowed on Hipposerve Personal Hosting Packages. Anyone who sends mass mail and is found to have caused problems affecting Hipposerve mail servers or IP reputation will be subject to a fine and have their domain and service suspended.

Any user who by their action or inaction and who’s services are found to be sending spam emails will be levied a fine of £90.00 to cover Hipposerve’s time in performing any clean-up action required to our mail servers. Any user who by their action or inaction and who’s service causes IP black listings may be given a fine of up to £200.00. Any user who by their action or inaction and who’s services result in complaints from other companies, for example spamcop, aol, yahoo etc. may be given a fine of not less than £90.00 to cover administration fee’s for Hipposerve’s time.

8. Databases

Any customer who’s database service usage results in excessively high server resource utilisation to the detriment of service or to our other customers will have their database suspended pending remedial action.  The onus is on the customer to monitor database space usage and take action to ensure they do not exceed their database limits.   We expect that any databases will be in use with a web site and will be maintained.  There should be no more than 1,000 tables per database and no more than one gigabyte of storage per database.  Any service found to exceed storage limits may result in the suspension of services.

Where this occurs we will un-suspend services on request providing that remedial action is taken by the customer to return the services back within limits.  Should such action not be taken as required and a further suspension be made an administration fee of £35.00 may be levied for our time.  Where overuse occurs we reserve the right to charge for space used over and above allowances in order to prevent future suspensions or to charge for future un-suspensions at the rate of £35.00 per instance.

9. Proxy Services

Proxy services are often used to hide the originating users true IP address or location.  Unfortunately this presents us with a number of issues relating to our obligations relating to security, finance and taxation and so accessing our services via proxy services is expressly prohibited.  Where we find proxy services have been used to sign up for an account or to otherwise disguise the location of the account holder we reserve the right to terminate any accounts and services used in this manner without notice. Hipposerve Digital Services Limited employs anti-fraud guard software at point of sale, in order to filter out access of this nature.

10. Personal Conduct

Staff at Hipposerve Digital Services Limited will always do our best to be respectful and in our dealings with you, by email or by phone, treat you in the manner in which we ourselves would expect to be treated. We fully expect that our customers will treat us the same way.

We understand that this can be difficult sometimes for both parties as we recognise that things can sometimes get frustrating. Computers do have errors (often caused by humans) and humans also make mistakes from time to time. Whether those computers or humans are either yours or ours, we expect that both parties will remain calm and deal with any issues that occur professionally.

On rare occasions a customer will become threatening or abusive. This can manifest itself in the use of all capitals in email (considered in general internet terms as shouting) or the use of abusive language. On the phone this includes shouting and abusive language.

On such occasions we reserve the right not to answer the email or to hang up. Our staff are instructed not to tolerate such abuse  If you feel that a conversation is going to be difficult, wait 10 minutes, and then contact our support team. We will always do our best to resolve your problem.

Hipposerve Digital Services Limited also reserves the right to terminate without notice, the accounts of any customer who uses threatening behaviour and/or racist, sexist or suggestive language. We may also notify any pertaining law enforcement agencies.

11. Social Media

We understand that social media is a good to voice opinions, however we its also often used as a platform to berate and abuse companies and to extort them with negative PR. This is often to push them into giving people their own way, whether that’s jumping a queue or getting products or services at a discount.

Abusing us on social media is also something we have a zero tolerance against. We wouldn’t dream of abusing you over social media, so we don’t expect our customers to abuse us. We understand that people may use it to voice dissatisfaction however we expect that customers remain civil and act with civility at the very least, as we will.

Abusive behaviour over social media may result in termination of your account. If appropriate we may also report offensive comments or behaviour to the relevant authorities.

12. Suspension and Termination

We will determine, in our sole discretion, whether you have breached this acceptable use policy. When a breach of this policy has occurred, we may take such action as we deem appropriate.

Failure to comply with this acceptable use policy constitutes a material breach of our Standard Terms and Conditions and, in addition to our rights contained therein, may result in our taking all or any of the following additional actions:

• legal proceedings against you for reimbursement of all costs on an indemnity basis (including, but not limited to, reasonable administrative and legal costs) resulting from the breach;
• further legal action against you;
• disclosure of such information to law enforcement authorities as we reasonably feel is necessary.

We exclude liability for actions taken in response to breaches of this acceptable use policy. The responses described in this policy are not limited, and we may take any other action we reasonably deem appropriate.

13. Complaints procedure

If you have a complaint then there are ways in which you can address them.

Your first port of all is an email to support@hipposerve.co.uk, or via opening a ticket in your client portal. with full details of your complaint. You should make sure you provide as much detail as possible including a timeline of events if applicable, the details of any of our team that you have dealt with, any relevant trouble ticket numbers and the time and date of any phone calls. In short, as much information as you can to help us conduct a thorough review of your complaint.

The complaint will be received and reviewed by a manager who will consider all of the information available and who may contact you to ask further questions if appropriate.

We will do everything we can to deal with any complaint raised and if we can find a way to resolve any issue to your satisfaction we will.

14. Sometimes things just don’t work out.

Although we try our best, and although we know both ourselves and our customers have the best intentions at heart, things might get to a point where they are not working out for either party.

It may be that you just cannot understand our systems or processes or perhaps you can’t understand how to use things. It may be that we, try as we might, cannot satisfy your requirements.

Just as you can leave or choose not to renew your services with us without giving a reason we may decide that in everyone’s best interest and to avoid further upset we will not renew your service with us.

Of course we really hope and will try our best to ensure that things don’t get to that stage, however if they do, we’ll be sure to give you at least a months notice to give you a chance to make alternative arrangements.

15. Changes to our acceptable use policy

We may revise this acceptable use policy at any time by amending this page. You are expected to check this page from time to time to take notice of any changes we make, as they are legally binding on you and form part of your contract with us.   Some of the provisions contained in this acceptable use policy may also be superseded by provisions or notices published elsewhere on our site.