IPS Hosting Policies

All IPS Hosting customers are bound by the policies set forth here upon ordering hosting services from Invision Power Services, Inc. Please contact us if you have any queries about the content or implementation of these policies.

Acceptable Use Policy

• Invision Power Services, Inc. reserves the right to refuse service or cancel existing accounts for any reason at any time. In the event of an account cancellation by IPS or the customer, IPS will not issue a refund.
• Invision Power Services, Inc. reserves the right to change fees at any time.
• Invision Power Services, Inc. is not responsible for lost revenue, traffic, or data caused by server down time or failure, domain name transfers, or any other error - mechanical or human.
• Customers of IPS are forbidden from partaking in an "abusive practice." The following is a list of possible abusive practices. IPS reserves the right to add to or modify this list at any time.
  
  
  • Sending unsolicited commercial e-mail with your account. Also, a violation is incurred if any unsolicited email is reported relating to your domain with us in anyway, regardless of what SMTP (outgoing mail server) was used to transmit the message.
  • Upload, posting or reproducing in any way materials protected by copyright without the permission of the copyright holder.
  • Uploading or creating any exploitable or aggressive materials on our shared webhosting platform is strictly prohibited. Any tools we locate that may be used to exploit the operating system, or any operating system, will result in immediate account termination. This includes eggdrop bots, buffer overflow programs, devices to attack or harass other internet users, and many other items. Invision Power Services, Inc., reserves the complete discretion to determine what materials fall under these headings.
  Participating in an abusive practice will lead to an immediate account termination without prior notice or refund of any pre-payment.
• Customers of IPS are to use our email services as an means of transport between themselves and their recipients. Our shared email servers are not storage servers. We are not responsible for any loss of emails if you abuse this policy as we reserve the right to purge an Inbox if that email account is using more than 5 MB of space. This policy is in effect because of the sheer risk of what email can do to a shared server. The memory/CPU overload and lack of resources it can cause can lead to putting a couple hundred sites out of business.
• Customers of IPS are bound to all system policies not specifically listed within this agreement. A list of all policies can be found at http://www.invisionpower.com/hosting/about/policies.html and is also available via fax upon request. Violation of any of these system policies will result in an immediate account cancellation without refund or access to hosted files.
• This agreement is not assignable or transferable without the express written consent of Invision Power Services, Inc.
• Invision Power Services, Inc.'s hosting services may only be used for lawful purposes. Transmission of any material in violation of any U.S. or any state regulation is prohibited. This includes but is not limited to: copyrighted material, material legally judged to be threatening or obscene, or material protected by trade secret.
• The client specifically agrees to indemnify and hold harmless Invision Power Services, Inc. from any claim resulting from a breach of these terms, and/or the use of the service which damages another.
• This agreement shall be governed by the Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Any action in regard to this agreement or arising out of its terms and conditions shall be instituted and litigated in the Virginia Circuit Court for Appomattox County. Each of the parties consents to jurisdiction in such Court and agrees that service of process as provided by the states and rules of civil procedures of the Commonwealth of Virginia shall be sufficient.
• This agreement constitutes the entire agreement between the parties hereto.

Spam/UCE Policy

Condensed spam policy

Bandwidth Usage Policy

The official IPS policy is to provide enough monthly bandwidth so that any site using normal resources will be able to perform without a problem. If an account reaches 80% of its bandwidth allotment, an e-mail will be dispatched to the account owner warning that more bandwidth is needed, which can be obtained through the IPS Client Area. If at any time an account reaches 100% of its bandwidth allotment, our system will automatically suspend the account until which time more bandwidth is purchased or until the end of the billing month (whichever is sooner.)

Customers have the right to use their account for any type of legal data transfer including providing free image services that can be linked from the owner's account from any other service.

Application & Resource Usage

While Invision Power Services, Inc. welcomes the use of PHP, CGI, Perl and many other normal processes, we must maintain a level of performance, security and reliability that is satisfactory to all customers on each shared hosting server.

Program/Script Usage

You may upload and utilize a CGI, PHP or Perl based program/script provided the following conditions are met:

• The script must be fully tested on a non-IPS Hosting shared server prior to uploading it to your account and you must have the knowledge required to install and operate the script. IPS Hosting servers are not to be used for development testing.
• The script may not interact with any server configuration or hardware. Users running scripts that interact with any server configuration or any hardware will be subject to immediate cancellation of the user account without refund.
• The script must be executed in a timely fashion. Any script that utilizes the processor for an excessive amount of time, as determined solely by an IPS Hosting system administrator, is subject to removal.
• The script must otherwise conform to all other IPS Hosting policies, including but not limited to the SPAM and resource usage policies.

Abuse of System Resources

Because all servers are shared by many customers, we must limit how much system resources (e.g. CPU, memory, disk I/O) any one account utilizes. Therefore, any program, application, script or process that consumes too many resources that has a significant impact on other customers performance, reliability, or otherwise, is considered an abuse of system resources.

Although our higher level packages allow for more disk space usage and bandwidth allotments, they are intended for small and medium-sized websites and traffic flow. Shared hosting accounts are not intended for large, resource intensive websites with heavy amounts of traffic. Such sites are best suited for our dedicated server packages.

Specific examples of system resource abuse include, but are not limited to:

• Background Processes
  IPS Hosting does not permit any running background processes without express approval. This includes, but is not limited to: IRC bots, bouncers, eggdrops, BitchX, XiRCON or any other program that interferes with normal server operation.
• MySQL Persistent and Remote Connections
  While in some instances persistent connections can increase server performance, we have found that connections are commonly not dropped properly leading to increased resource overhead. As such, persistent connections are prohibited. Additionally, both for security and performance purposes, remote MySQL connections are disabled and forbidden.
• Cron Job Usage
  While we permit the use of cron jobs to automate regular tasks, such tasks can be resource intensive and if it is found that your cron job is having a detrimental effect on the overall server performance, the task may be disabled.
• Forbidden Scripts
  The following scripts are prohibited from being operated on any IPS Hosting shared server:
  
  
  • Matt Wrights Formmail Clone or any derivative thereof. (Exploit allows mass SPAM capabilities)
  • Any CGI/Perl based forum discussion product (Includes: UBB, YaBB, Ikonboard) (Resource Intensive)
  • Hivemail any version below 1.3 (Resource Intensive)
  • vBulletin 3.0x and above (Resource Intensive)
  • VirtuaNews (Resource Intensive)
  • Unreal Portal - any version (Resource Intensive)
  • PHPNuke - any version
  • phpBB - any version (Excessive number of exploits)

Policies Violation

Any account found to be in violation of this policy will receive an e-mail warning of any action taken or to be taken and will provide, whenever possible, an opportunity to rectify the cause of the violation. In extreme cases, the IPS Hosting administration team may suspend or terminate the account or offending process(es) immediately to protect the integrity and performance of the server. 24 hour notice will be provided when possible.