Acceptable Use Policy

Introduction

This document sets forth the principles, guidelines and requirements of the Acceptable Use Policy of Omega8.cc (“Company”) governing the use by the Customer (“Customer”) of the Company’s services and products (“Services and Products”). The Purpose of the Omega8.cc’s Acceptable Use Policy, hereinafter referred to as the AUP, is to comply with all federal, state, and local laws coupled with protecting the network security, network availability, physical security, Customer privacy, and other factors affecting the services provided by Omega8.cc. Omega8.cc reserves the right to impose reasonable rules and regulations regarding the use of its services provided to all Customers and such rules and regulations are subject to change. Such rules and regulations are located on the Internet at https://omega8.cc/aup. The AUP is not an all-inclusive or exhaustive list and Omega8.cc reserves the right to modify the AUPs at any time as needed, effective upon either the posting of the modified AUPs to https://omega8.cc/aup or notification to the Customer via email. Any violation of the AUPs may result in the suspension or termination of your account or such other action as Omega8.cc deems appropriate. No credits will be issued for any interruption in service resulting from policy violations.

VIOLATION OF ANY SECTION OF THE AUP IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED AND MAY RESULT IN THE IMMEDIATE TERMINATION OR SUSPENSION OF THE SERVICES YOU RECEIVE FROM Omega8.cc.

Any questions or comments regarding the AUP should be directed to aup@omega8.cc

Compliance with Law

Customer shall not post, transmit, re-transmit or store material on or through any of Company’s Services or Products which, in the sole judgment of the Company (i) is in violation of any local, state, federal or non-United States law or regulation, (ii) threatening, obscene, indecent, defamatory or that otherwise could adversely affect any individual, group or entity (collectively, “Persons”) or (iii) violates the rights of any person, including rights protected by copyright, trade secret, patent or other intellectual property or similar laws or regulations including, but not limited to, the installation or distribution of “pirated” or other software products that are not appropriately licensed for use by Customer. Customer shall be responsible for determining what laws or regulations are applicable to its use of the Services and Products.

Customer Security Obligation

Each Customer must use reasonable care in keeping software they run on the Omega8.cc’s servers up-to-date and patched with the latest security updates. Failure to use reasonable care to protect your account may result in a security compromise by outside sources. A compromised server creating network interference will result in immediate Customer notification and will be disconnected from the network immediately so as to not directly affect other Customers. No service credits will be issued for outages resulting from disconnection due to breached server security. The Customer is solely responsible for any breaches of security under Customer control affecting servers. If a Customer intentionally creates a security breach, the cost to resolve any damage to Customer’s server or other servers will be charged directly to the Customer. The labor used to resolve such damage is categorized as Emergency Security Breach Recovery and is currently charged at $300 USD per hour.

System and Network Security

Violations of system or network security are strictly prohibited, and may result in criminal and civil liability. Omega8.cc investigates all incidents involving such violations and will cooperate with law enforcement if criminal violation is suspected.

Examples of system or network security violations include, without limitation, the following:

Introduction of malicious programs into the network or server (example: viruses, worms, Trojan Horses and other executables intended to inflict harm).
Effecting security breaches or disruptions of Internet communication and/or connectivity. Security breaches include, but are not limited to, accessing data of which the Customer is not an intended recipient or logging into a server or account that the Customer is not expressly authorized to access. For purposes of this section, “disruption” includes, but is not limited to port scans, flood pings, email-bombing, packet spoofing, IP spoofing and forged routing information.
Executing any form of network activity that will intercept data not intended for the Customer’s server.
Circumventing user authentication or security of any host, network or account.
Interfering with or denying service to any user other than the Customer’s host (example: denial of service attack or distributed denial of service attack).
Using any program script/command, or sending messages of any kind, designed to interfere with or to disable, a user’s terminal session, via any means, locally or via the Internet.
Failing to comply with the Company’s procedure relating to the activities of Customers on the Company’s premises. Violators of the policy are responsible, without limitations, for the cost of labor to correct all damage done to the operation of the network and business operations supported by the network. Such labor is categorized as Emergency Security Breach Recovery and is currently charged at $300 USD per hour required. Network interference by any Customers that may cause or is currently causing network interference with another Customer will be disconnected immediately. No service credits will be issued to Customers disconnected for network violations.
Transmission, distribution or storage of any material in violation of any applicable law or regulation is prohibited. This includes, without limitation, material protected by copyright, trademark, trade secret or other intellectual property right used without proper authorization, and material that is obscene, defamatory, constitutes an illegal threat, or violates export control laws.
Sending Unsolicited Bulk Email (“UBE”, “spam”). The sending of any form of Unsolicited Bulk Email through Omega8.cc servers is prohibited. Likewise, the sending of UBE from another service provider advertizing a web site, email address or utilizing any resource hosted on Omega8.cc servers is prohibited. Omega8.cc accounts or services may not be used to solicit customers from, or collect replies to, messages sent from another Internet Service Provider where those messages violate either this Policy or that of the other provider.
Running Unconfirmed Mailing Lists. Subscribing email addresses to any mailing list without the express and verifiable permission of the email address owner is prohibited. All mailing lists run by Omega8.cc customers must be Closed-loop (“Confirmed Opt-in”). The subscription confirmation message received from each address owner must be kept on file for the duration of the existence of the mailing list. Purchasing lists of email addresses from 3rd parties for mailing to from any Omega8.cc - hosted domain, or referencing any Omega8.cc account, is prohibited.
Running any process that listen on a network port unless first authorized by Omega8.cc
Running ads servers for third party sites not hosted on the same account. If discovered, will be blocked for all third party sites without notice, and may result with account termination.
Running chat servers or clients, including (but not limited to) IRC servers, IRC clients, Instant Messaging proxies, and web-based chat programs.
Running game servers or clients, inlcuding (but not limited to) web-based games, interactive shell games, and play-by-email games that require a process running on Company’s server.
Advertising, transmitting, or otherwise making available any software, program, product, or service that is designed to violate this AUP or the AUP of any other Internet Service Provider, which includes, but is not limited to, the facilitation of the means to send Unsolicited Bulk Email, initiation of pinging, flooding, mail-bombing, denial of service attacks.
Operating an account on behalf of, or in connection with, or reselling any service to, persons or firms listed in the Spamhaus Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database at www.spamhaus.org.
Unauthorized attempts by a user to gain access to any account or computer resource not belonging to that user (e.g., “cracking”).
Obtaining or attempting to obtain service by any means or device with intent to avoid payment.
Accessing or attempting to access your account or other Omega8.cc services after you (or Company) has cancelled Customer’s account.
Unauthorized access, alteration, destruction, or any attempt thereof, of any information of any Omega8.cc customers or end-users by any means or device, including the use of ‘sudo’ or other privileged operating system commands.
Knowingly engage in any activities designed to harass, or that will cause a denial-of-service (e.g., synchronized number sequence attacks) to any other user whether on the Omega8.cc network or on another provider’s network.
Using Omega8.cc Services to interfere with the use of the Omega8.cc network by other customers or authorized users.

System and Network Resource Usage

Omega8.cc’s servers and networks are carefully maintained to provide optimum performance for certain types of usage; namely, serving content on the Internet. Customers are expected to operate their accounts in such a manner as to maintain system and network performance and stability. Omega8.cc monitors its servers and networks carefully, and failure to comply with the following restrictions could result in the termination of service and fees assessed against your account:

Pressflow Drupal Core Requirement Pressflow core is required for all Drupal 6 and Drupal 5 sites, but at the same time it is also expected that imported site (and its platform) can be initially based on vanilla Drupal and not Pressflow. Omega8.cc even recommends to start with 1:1 copy of Customer’s previous environment and then either use one of built-in Pressflow based platforms or create Customer’s own platform with Pressflow core and migrate imported site there. Customer can use vanilla Drupal 6 and Drupal 5 based platforms only during the intermediate post-import phase, just to make sure that the initial import will not be affected by any on-the-fly code changes, but Customer can't use non-Pressflow core on any live site. Customer must migrate to Pressflow based platform as soon as possible, and before pointing imported site's domain DNS to Customer’s hosted Aegir instance IP address. Running vanilla Drupal 6 or Drupal 5 based live sites is prohibited for performance, security and system compatibility reasons.
Excessive Processor Utilization Processes utilizing a significant percentage of a server’s processor will, at Omega8.cc’s discretion, be terminated. Omega8.cc will make every attempt to notify Customer of this process termination and the underlying reason. Omega8.cc utilizes several automated tools to discover and “re-nice” these processes, and in some instances the process may be terminated automatically without warning. It is Customer’s responsibility to ensure their processes use a minimum of server resources.
Excessive Network Utilization While Customers are allocated a certain amount of bandwidth per month, Omega8.cc generally prefers not to cap Customers’ bandwidth. To this end, Customers using an excessive amount of bandwidth in a short period of time will, at Omega8.cc’s discretion, be throttled or have their site and/or account otherwise rendered unusable until the Customer is able to rectify their usage.
Scheduled Processes Scheduled processes, including (but not limited to) “cron jobs” and “at jobs”, can significantly drain server and network resources due to overuse. Customers are restricted from running any processor- or network-intensive scheduled process more than once per day. Processes which do not excessively use (at Omega8.cc’s discretion) processor or network resources may be run more often, but no more than once every five minutes.
Process Monitoring Using any script or program that continually monitors running processes, internal or external sites or applications, or e-mail accounts that execute at an interval of less than five minutes is strictly prohibited.
Long-running Processes Omega8.cc strictly prohibits the execution of long-running processes (more than 5 minutes of CPU time) unless specifically authorized in advance by Omega8.cc.
Terminal/Shell Access As a service to Customers, to make managing their account easier, Omega8.cc makes available server access via SSH (i.e.: shell accounts). Customers are prohibited from using this method of account access to attempt to access other Customers’ or Omega8.cc’s accounts or information. In addition, to prevent excessive resource consumption, Customers are restricted to the use of two terminals at once and must disconnect them when not in use (Omega8.cc currently allows up to 30 minutes of “idle” time before automatic disconnection.) Omega8.cc may, at any time, remove access to this service to any customer for abuse, excessive utilization, any activity deemed harmful or adverse to Omega8.cc or its Customers, or to improve system and network security. All Customers should either use SSH keys or make sure to update their SSH password before it expires every 90 days after last change. Repetitive requests for password reset will result with processing delays for security reasons and will require a fee of $152 per request before it's processed.
Database Access Database resources, including Percona and Redis, are closely monitored by Omega8.cc. Access to databases is restricted to within individual servers. Omega8.cc allows Customers the ability to “tunnel” into a server via SSH for testing database connectivity from a single workstation. This access is only allowed for testing purposes and must not be used for general database access from outside of Omega8.cc’s network.
Number of Allowed Databases Customers are restricted to using only the number of databases included within their hosting plan. Any databases found that exceed this number will be deleted by Omega8.cc and Omega8.cc is not responsible for data loss due to databases deleted for this reason.
Resolution of Problems All problems found by Omega8.cc that are within the Customer’s control and that result in excessive server or network utilization are the responsibility of the Customer to fix. Omega8.cc may, from time to time, assist Customer in researching and repairing the problem; this is done as a courtesy and does not imply that Omega8.cc has taken responsibility for fixing this problem. Omega8.cc may, at its discretion, remove access to the services impacted until the Customer resolves the problem.

Omega8.cc reserves the right to remove access to any service or feature that it feels is being abused, even if through negligence or ignorance, by the Customer.

Internet Etiquette

Each Customer is expected to execute reasonable Internet etiquette. The Customer will comply with the rules appropriate to any network to which Omega8.cc may provide access. The Customer should not post, transmit, or permit Internet access to information the Customer desires to keep confidential. The Customer is not permitted to post any material that is illegal, libelous, and tortuous, indecently depicts children or is likely to result in retaliation against Omega8.cc by offended users. Omega8.cc reserves the right to refuse or terminate service at any time for violation of this section. This includes advertising services or sites via IRC or USENET in clear violation of the policies of the IRC channel or USENET group.

Child Pornography

Omega8.cc will cooperate fully with any criminal investigation into a Customer’s violation of the Child Protection Act of 1984 concerning child pornography.

According to the Child Protection Act, child pornography includes photographs, films, video or any other type of visual presentation that shows a person who is or is depicted as being under the age of eighteen years and is engaged in or is depicted as engaged in explicit sexual activity, or any written material or visual representation that advocates or counsels sexual activity with a person under the age of eighteen years.

Email Policy

Mass Mailings: Omega8.cc has a zero tolerance policy on SPAM, Junk E-mail or UCE. Spam, Junk-mail and UCE are defined as: the sending of the same, or substantially similar, unsolicited electronic mail messages, whether commercial or not, to more than one recipient. A message is considered unsolicited if it is posted in violation of a newsgroup charter or if it is sent to a recipient who has not requested or invited the message. UCE also includes e-mail with forged headers, compromised mail server relays, and false contact information. This prohibition extends to the sending of unsolicited mass mailings from another service, which in any way implicates the use of Omega8.cc whether or not the message actually originated from our servers.

Mailing Lists: Omega8.cc’s mass mailing rules also apply to mailing lists, list servs, or mailing services you may contract with. The policy is stated as follows: An acceptable mailing list will be focused at a targeted audience that has voluntarily signed up for your e-mail information or that has made their e-mail address available for distribution of information from you. The list must also allow for automatic removal by all end Customers with non-distribution in the future.

If your actions have caused Omega8.cc mail servers or Omega8.cc IP address ranges to be placed on blackhole lists and other mail filtering software systems used by companies on the internet, you will be assessed a $500 charge to your account and $300 per hour for administrative charges incurred to remove and protect mail servers and IP ranges.

Violation of the above terms will result in one or all of the following:

A warning via email.
Removal of DNS for the advertised / originating site.
Temporary shutdown of the server or a block on outgoing mail.
IP address routing to null.

Repeat violation of the above terms will result in the following actions:

Immediate disconnection of service with no re-connection.
$500 fee assessed to your account for violation.

Copyright Infringement

Omega8.cc services may only be used for lawful purposes. Transmission, distribution, or storage of any information, data or material in violation of United States or state regulation or law, or by the common law, is prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to, material protected by copyright, trademark, trade secret, or other intellectual property rights.

Utilizing or distributing unauthorized copies of software constitutes a violation of federal and state law. If you copy, distribute or install the software in ways that the license does not allow, you are violating federal copyright law. Omega8.cc will cooperate with all law enforcement agencies in relation to alleged copyright infringement housed on our servers.

IP Allocation

Customers shall NOT use IP addresses that were not assigned to them by Omega8.cc. Any account utilizing IP addresses outside of those assigned to it will be suspended from network access until such time as the IP addresses overlap can be corrected. Use of an unauthorized IP address will result in a charge of $25 per IP. Use of an unauthorized IP address creating a third party Customer outage will result in a $500 charge and termination of service until the IP allocation is resolved.

Suspension and Cancellation

Omega8.cc reserves the right to suspend service to any Customer located on our servers for violation of the AUP. Omega8.cc will use reasonable care in notifying the Customer and in resolving the problem in a method resulting in the least amount of service interference as reasonably possible. For single or for continued and repeated violations of the AUP or, at Omega8.cc’s discretion, to prevent a violation of the AUP, Omega8.cc reserves the right to:

Terminate service without notice for single or for continued and repeated violations of the AUP.
Limit Customer access to services or implement service and resource usage restrictions.
Ask the Customer to upgrade to a higher service plan.

Omega8.cc shall be the sole determiner of which of the above actions are to be taken, and can reverse or revise its decision at any time. Continued violations of the AUP resulting in cancellation of services will also result in a fee in the amount of US $500 and contract acceleration for all amounts outstanding under the contract term.

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