Terms of Service

These are the terms and conditions of service for OakHosting.NET; whenever you purchase services from us you agree to them.

1. Implied Terms: The Privacy Policy, Acceptable Use Policy, and Service Level Agreement of OakHosting.NET form part of this agreement, as though those policies were reproduced verbatim within this agreement. If you register a domain with us, we will register the domain on your behalf with Mesh Digital Inc., and your order implies acceptance of their terms and conditions.
2. Contact Information: If you sign up for services with us, you are responsible for keeping the e-mail address we hold for you up to date, so that we can contact you. We strongly recommend you use an e-mail address that is not hosted on any services you have with us, so that we still have a channel of communication should our servers have a problem.
3. Acceptance of Order: Your order has been accepted once you receive an e-mail confirming this.
   
   1. Requests for hosting packages are subject to fraud and other abuse checks; you may be asked for further information before your order is accepted.
   2. Requests for a dedicated IP address will only be accepted with a reason we deem sufficient to assign you a dedicated IP; the only reason we automatically accept is the wish to operate an SSL certificate on your account, and if this is your reason a certificate needs to be active otherwise we might move you back to a shared IP address.
   3. Requests to register a domain name are subject to the domain name still being unregistered at the relevant registry when we manually provision your order.
4. Payment: Payment for all services is in advance.
   
   1. The billing cycle (monthly, annual, or other) will depending on the package your subscribe to.
   2. When you first subscribe, you pay for the first cycle. If you sign up on any day other than the first day of the month, your first invoice is for the pro-rated amount to see you through to the date of your next invoice, which will be dated the first of a month.
   3. An invoice will be raised for your renewal shortly before the end of each pre-paid period of time.
   4. If your invoice is not paid 3 days after the renewal date, we reserve the right to add 3% to the value of the invoice. If your invoice is not paid 10 days after the renewal date, your service with us will be suspended. If your invoice is not paid 17 days after the renewal date, your service with us will be terminated.
5. Payment for Domain Name Registration: The above payment terms are for hosting services. Domain name registration will have a separate billing cycle (usually biannually for UK domains, and annually for others). Payment for renewals of domain names are strictly due before the expiry date; if you allow your domain to expire, whilst we will do our best to re-register it we cannot guarantee to do so and may need to charge you additional fees in the process.
6. Migration Support: We offer free support migrating your data to and from our services:
   
   1. If you take out a service with us, and you already have web hosting with another provider, we will migrate your data from your previous provider if we are able to do so. In order to do this, you will need to supply us with the log-in information for your old provider when asked. If your previous provider does not use cPanel based hosting, or if your previous provider has restricted the backup capabilities on your account with them, we may not be able to migrate everything, but we will still do our best to help.
   2. If you wish to leave our services, and take out hosting with another provider, we will help you migrate to them. In order to do this, we will supply your new host with a full backup on request. If you give us at least a week's notice of your intended date to switch providers, we will reduce the TTL on your DNS entries to speed up the change's propogation. Telling us of your desire to leave, and asking for our help doing so, is not the same thing as cancelling your service with us. Once the migration has been completed, you will need to cancel your services as detailed in this agreement.
7. Price Increases: We will not increase the price of our services from the prices you first pay us without 30 days prior notice. If we need to increase our prices, the new prices will take affect for any services you have with us from your next renewal. If you choose to continue using our services, that is taken as acceptance of the new prices.
8. Your right to Cancel and Refunds: To cancel any of your services with us, you must go to the Products and Services section of My OakHosting, and click the button to cancel. If you need us to supply you with a backup copy of your account, you must specify this in your cancellation request. We cannot accept cancellations by e-mail or phone, because of the difficulty in verifying that the instruction comes from you. You may either instruct us:
   
   1. To cancel your services immediately,
   2. To cancel your service as from the next renewal date
   3. To cancel your services due to a change in this agreement (on which see below).
9. Refunds when you cancel: If you have paid for services beyond the date of cancellation, you may be due a refund, subject to the following terms:
   
   1. No refunds are given for supplementary fees charged to supply domain name registration, a dedicated IP address or an SSL Certificate.
   2. No refunds are given for accounts that have been suspended or terminated because of a breach of these conditions.
   3. No refunds are given for accounts that have used all the bandwidth allotted to them for the month in which the cancellation request is made.
   4. Other than these three exceptions, cancellation in the first 30 days of service will receive a full refund of all fees paid for those services. This only applies for first-time customers (anyone who has previously held an account with us not being eligible), and only applies for the first package (anyone who has more than one package with us not being eligible if they merely reduce the number of packages).
   5. After the first 30 days of service, customers on a monthly billing cycle receive no refund for the unused portion of their billing cycle.
   6. After the first 30 days of service, customers on a longer billing cycle will receive a pro-rated refund for 30 days less than the unused portion of their billing cycle.
   7. To illustrate this last scenario, a customer who pays for one year's hosting, but cancels after 90 days, has not used 275 days of their billing cycle. They therefore receive a refund equivalent to 245 days' service, which would be 245/365 of a full year's charges.
   8. Some payment providers set up your recurring payments to us from their end; if you cancel a service with us, you are responsible for cancelling the recurring payment agreement with them.
   9. We will refund by the same payment method as your most recent payment. If that payment provider allows us to issue a refund on that payment, we will do so; otherwise we will send a payment to you. Any fees the payment provider charges you to receive that payment are your liability.
10. Our right to cancel:
    
    1. If you break any of these terms, we may suspend your account or terminate the account, depending on the severity of the breach. For less-severe breaches, we will notify you by e-mail, and you must then rectify the issue promptly. We will decide how severe a breach of these terms is, and we will decide on the most appropriate response.
    2. We may, at any time and for any reason, give you 60 days notice that your account will be cancelled. If we do so, we will help you to find an alternative provider for the services you have with us, and co-operate fully with the migration of your services with us to them. If we give you such notice, all other clauses of this agreement remain in force during that 60 day period. If you have paid for services on a billing cycle of longer than one month, we will refund the unused portion on a pro-rated basis (without withholding any of the refund because of your cancellation).
    3. In this circumstance, you are responsible for transferring any domains you have registered with us to a different provider.
    4. The sub-clause above is included in this agreement to reassure you as to how we would handle the scenario if we wished to cease offering web hosting. Each year, many providers close down their services without refund and without giving their clients a backup of their data. We take better care of our customers than that.
11. Bandwidth overage: If you use more than your allotted bandwidth in any given month, your account will be suspended until: (i) the next month begins, or (ii) you pay us an amount we agree to increase temporarily that month's bandwidth limit, or (iii) you purchase an additional bandwidth add-on to allot your account more bandwidth going forwards.
12. Backups: We aim to back up each account on our services every 24 hours, and to keep at least 3 differently dated backups. However you are responsible for all data stored on our servers by you, and you are therefore encouraged to maintain your own backups. This includes, without implying limitation: databases, files, e-mail messages and the configuration of your hosting account.
13. Reasonable use of shared resources: We only provide hosting on shared servers, which means other customers will be hosted on the same servers. You agree only to use a reasonable share of the CPU, memory, disk and other resources on the servers you use. If, in our sole opinion, your hosted services need more resources than we can provide on a shared basis, we will try to help you reduce your resource use, and if this cannot be done we will help you find another hosting provider that may be more suitable. In extreme cases, we may have to suspend your account while it is migrated elsewhere, in order to restore service to other users. Specifically, amongst other things this includes:
    
    1. your account causing the services of other accounts to be less responsive
    2. excessive inode use. (To simplify, an inode is a file, or more accurately a file pointer. It is more resource-intensive to host a large number of small files than it is to host a smaller number of larger files). You can use 100 inodes for every megabyte of disk space available to your account, which is ample for most needs.
14. Limited Liability: Our liability is limited to the price you pay for our services. Our Service Level Agreement details the amount we will pay, in terms of a full or partial refund, should our services be unavailable for any reason. We are not liable for any consequential loss, including loss of earnings.
15. Responsibility for Content: We are a provider of hosting services; you are responsible for, and we disclaim all liability for, any content that you publish using our services. In this context, "content" includes websites hosted by us, e-mails that travel through our servers, and any content posted on a forum or chat session hosted by us.
16. Amendments: This agreement may be changed at any time, although any such changes will be notified to existing customers in advance. If the revised agreement is not acceptable to an existing customer, they may cancel their services with us and continue under the previous agreement provided they take the following steps:
    
    1. They request cancellation of all services with us by following the link in the "Products and Services" section of My OakHosting, and at the same time raise a support ticket to our Billing department. This must be done within 7 days of being advised of such changes.
    2. That support ticket explicitly states that the reason for cancellation is the change to this agreement.
    3. In that support ticket, they nominate a day when they wish their services with us to cease. The nominated day must be no more than 30 days after the day on which this support ticket is raised.
    4. Refunds for cancellations made in this way will be the same as for other cancellations under this agreement.
17. Enforceability: If any provision of this agreement is held invalid or unenforceable by any court of competent jurisdiction, the other provisions of this agreement will remain in full force and effect. Any provision of this agreement held invalid or unenforceable only in part or degree will remain in full force and effect to the extent not held invalid or unenforceable.

Last revised: 24th August 2011