SKGOLD® Hosting >> Terms of Use:

Last Updated April 27, 2021

The use of services from SKGOLD® Marketing LTD. [ hereafter referred to as "SKGOLD® Hosting" ] constitutes agreement to these terms.

The customer agree to indemnify and hold harmless SKGOLD® Hosting from any claims resulting from the use of our services.

All services provided by SKGOLD® Hosting may only be used for lawful purposes.

We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Any material that, in our judgment, is illegal, obscene, threatening, or violates our terms of service in any manner will be removed from SKGOLD® Hosting servers with or without notice.

1. Account Setup

The Web Hosting and Domain Registration business has a high fraud risk, therefore SKGOLD® Hosting will setup your account after we have received your payment and SKGOLD® Hosting and/or our business partner(s) will screen your order(s) in case of fraud.

2. Your Contact Information and Email on file

It is solely your responsibility to provide us with proper Contact and Identity information. You must provide us with an email address that is not @domain(s) you are signing up under. If there is ever an abuse issue or we need to contact you, the primary email address will be used for this purpose. It is your responsibility to ensure that the primary email address on file with us is current and up to date at all times.

In some cases it will be necessary to provide government issued photo identification. If you fail to meet these requirements, the order may be considered fraudulent and will be denied. Providing false Contact and/or Identity information of any kind may result in the termination of your account without any refund. Suspicious accounts and/or accounts that violate our Terms of Use will be terminated immediately without notice. All illegal websites will be terminated and reported to authorities.

3. Content

Only lawful and legal content allowed to be on SKGOLD® Hosting servers. The laws of the Canada and the United States of America apply. Content that violate any trademark or copyright is prohibited. This includes but is not limited to unauthorized copying of photographs, music, books or any other copyrighted materials. Using webhosting account as a backup/storage device is not permitted.

• Please see examples of unacceptable content in the right column.

Access to networks or systems outside of your direct control must be with expressed written consent from the third party. Any account found connecting to a third party network or system without authorization from the third party is subject to suspension. SKGOLD® Hosting may request a require documentation to prove access to a third party network or system is authorized.

4. Zero Tolerance Spam Policy

We take a zero tolerance against sending of Unsolicited Bulk Email [ spam ]. "Safe lists" and purchased lists, Facebook Fans or Friends, Twitter Followers, or LinkedIn Connections where the recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent will be treated as Unsolicited Bulk Email [ spam ].

Any user who sends out Unsolicited Bulk Email [ spam ] will have their account terminated without notice.

SKGOLD® Hosting reserve the right to charge the holder of the account used to send any unsolicited e-mail a clean up fee. This cost of the clean up fee is left entirely to the discretion of SKGOLD® Hosting.

SKGOLD® Hosting reserve the right to require changes or disable as necessary any web site, account, database, or other component that does not comply with our established policies. SKGOLD® Hosting also reserves the right to make any such modifications in an emergency at our sole discretion.

5. Security, Backups and Data Loss

You are responsible for all actions taken under your account. This includes the compromise of credentials such as username and password. It is required that you use a secure password. If a weak password is used, your account may be suspended until you agree to use a more secure password. Audits may be done to prevent weak passwords from being used. If your password is found to be weak, we will notify you and allow time for you to change your password.

It is your responsibility to ensure that scripts/programs installed under your account are secure, updated and permissions of directories are set properly, regardless of installation method. If it is possible, set permissions on most directories at least to 755.

Any account that is found to be compromised may be suspended and/or terminated. If you do not clean up malicious files and scripts from your account after being notified by SKGOLD® Hosting, we reserve the right to keep your account suspended. Upon a request, SKGOLD® Hosting may scan and clean-up your account for an additional fee.

Your use of the service is at your sole risk. We are not responsible for files and data residing on your account. Our backup service is ran on Saturday of each week and overwrites any of our previous backups. Only one week of backups are kept. We don't keep backups for suspended and/or cancelled accounts. The backup service is provided to you as a courtesy and may be modified or terminated at any time.

You agree to take full responsibility for files and data transferred and to maintain all appropriate backup of files and data stored on our servers.

6. Payment Information

You agree to supply appropriate payment for the services received from us, in advance of the time period during which such services are provided.

It is your responsibility to ensure that your payment information is up to date, and that all invoices are paid on time. Any invoice that is overdue for 6 days and not paid will result in an account suspension until account balance has been paid in full. Any invoice that is overdue for 60 days and not paid will result in an account termination and all files will be removed from the server.

SKGOLD® Hosting reserve the right to change any service charges at anytime.

7. Money back Guarantee

Each Shared Web Hosting plan on SKGOLD® Hosting servers carry the 60 days unconditional money back guarantee. If you are not completely satisfied with our services within the first 60 days, you will be given a full refund of the plan amount. Domain Registrations and renewals, SSL certificates, Dedicated IP, administrative fees, install fees, Website Builder set up fees and all web hosting addons are not eligible for 60 days money back.

8. Cancellation and Refunds

You agree that until and unless you notify SKGOLD® Hosting of your desire to cancel any or all services received, those services will be billed on a recurring basis and not eligible for refund.

We have specific procedures for canceling services with SKGOLD® Hosting. Our cancellation procedures are very simple and protect you from UNAUTHORIZED cancellations. SKGOLD® Hosting will only accept cancellation requests through the client area via the cancellation options described on this page.

Due to the time difference with domain registries all domain names will be renewed automatically one day before the renewal date. You must disable the Auto-Renew option in the domains management section of our client area prior to a domain name renewal date if you don’t wish to renew your domain name.

To request a refund, please open a support ticket via the Support Ticket system. Refund requests for Shared Web Hosting plans after 60 days will be credited (not refunded) to your account on a prorated basis of any unused time. Only first-time customers who paid the first invoice with a credit card or with PayPal are eligible for a refund. For example, if you've had an account with us before, cancelled and signed up again, you will not be eligible for a refund or if you have opened a second account with us. Payments by checks or money orders are non-refundable, but could be credited to your hosting account. Domain names registrations and renewals, SSL certificates, dedicated IP, upgrade fees, administrative fees, install fees, Website Builder set up fees and all hosting addons are not eligible for refund. The price of a domain name registration will be deducted from the refund amount if a domain name registration has been provided for free within a package or promotion.

Customers may transfer Domain Names from SKGOLD® at any time until the end of a Redemption Grace Period. You will have to contact the other Registrar to begin the transfer process. We are unable to initiate this process for you. You must request an authorization code via the Support Ticket system. You may NOT transfer a Domain Name if that name was registered or transferred within the past 60 days or if that Domain Name, or any information associated with it, is currently in dispute.

Violations of the Terms of Use or providing false Contact and/or Identity information of any kind will waive the refund policy and a $10 administration fee will be applied. SKGOLD® Hosting reserves the right to refund you the remaining amount or no refund at all. This is at the sole discretion of SKGOLD® Hosting. We reserve the right to cancel any account at any time with or without notice.

You agree to contact SKGOLD® hosting via support ticket system to resolve any discrepancy before initiating a dispute or charge-back with your credit card company, your bank or PayPal. If you fail to contact us before initiating a dispute or charge-back you will waive your right for refund.  Filing a dispute or charge-back is not an acceptable method of getting your refund. Simply follow the Cancellation and Refunds policy and you will receive your refund as promised.

9. Uptime Guarantee

Each web hosting plan on SKGOLD® Hosting servers carry a 99.9% uptime guarantee. You may receive one month of credit on your account. Approval of the credit is at the sole discretion of SKGOLD® Hosting dependant upon justification provided. Third party monitoring service reports may not be used for justification due to a variety of factors including the monitor's network capacity/transit availability. The uptime of the server is defined as the reported uptime from the operating system and the Apache Web Server which may differ from the uptime reported by other individual services. To request a credit, please contact Billing department with justification. All requests must be made in writing via Support Ticket system.

10. Price Change

The amount you pay for hosting will never increase from the date of purchase (except promotional and discounted payments). We reserve the right to change prices listed on our site, and the right to increase the amount of resources given to plans at any time.

11. Discounts and Coupons

Discounts and coupon codes are reserved for new accounts only and may not be used towards the purchase of a domain registration, SSL certificates, Dedicated IP, and webhosting addons unless otherwise specified. Discounts and coupon codes are only valid towards the initial purchase, and do not affect the renewal or recurring price. Any account found in violation of these policies will be reviewed by our billing department and the appropriate invoices will be added to the account.

12. Unlimited disk space and bandwidth

SKGOLD® Hosting wants you to have the resources for building a great online presence and therefore we are offering you a large amount of disk space and bandwidth. Initially we will assign 2000 MB of disk space and 20000 MB of bandwidth to your "Unlimited Plan". We will increase your disk space and/or bandwidth without any additional cost (NORMAL usage applied) every time you reach 80% of assigned amount.

SKGOLD® Hosting provides shared hosting environments for personal websites and businesses. Your website will be hosted with hundreds of other websites in a virtual community. Under the "NORMAL usage" we mean that you operate a website that utilizes resources in a manner similar to most of our other customers, so to ensure reliable and fast service to all of our customers. Accounts that affect server performance will be asked to upgrade to a Dedicated Server or will be suspended.

Examples of "ABNORMAL usage": (1) Using our hosting service primarily for online file storage and/or archiving electronic files is absolutely prohibited and would not be considered as a NORMAL usage. (2) Storage of large numbers and/or large sizes of emails, pictures, photos, video and/or audio files that require more resources to support than a normal business or personal website would not be considered as a NORMAL usage. (3) Large corporations that require more resources to support than a normal business website would not be considered as a NORMAL usage.

13. Bandwidth Usage (except "Unlimited Plan")

You are allocated a monthly bandwidth allowance. This allowance varies depending on the hosting package you purchase. Should your account pass the allocated amount we reserve the right to suspend the account until the start of the next allocation, suspend the account until you upgrade to a higher level of package, terminate the account and/or charge you an additional fee for the overages. Unused bandwidth in one month cannot be carried over to the next month.

14. Resource Usage

Users may not:

1. Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.
2. Run any type of interactive real-time chat applications that require server resources. Remotely-hosted services are fully allowed.
3. Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
4. Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
5. Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1492, etc.
6. Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy, etc).
7. Run any bit torrent application, tracker, or client. Please note that you may link to torrents off server, but may not host or store them.
8. Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities.
9. Run Cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes.
10. Run any MySQL queries longer than 15 seconds. MySQL tables should be indexed appropriately.
11. When using PHP include functions for including a local file, include the local file rather than the URL. Instead of include ("http://yourdomain.com/include.php") use include ("include.php")
12. To help reduce usage, do not force html to handle server-side code (like php and shtml).

The use of more than 250,000 inodes on any shared account may potentially result in a warning first, and if no action is taken future suspension. Accounts found to be exceeding the 100,000 inode limit will automatically be removed from our backup system to avoid over-usage, however databases will still be backed up. Every file (a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode.

15. Mail Policy, Mail List and Mail Limits

There is a 500 hourly email limit per domain. This limit is also applied towards mailman. If you send more than 500 emails in any hour, most of the e-mails will bounce back with an undeliverable error.

There are 60 pop checks per hour limit per email address. If you go over this you're likely to get a wrong password error message saying login incorrect. Just wait an hour and it will automatically unlock you. To prevent this from happening again, make sure to disable auto checking, or at least set it to something higher than 10 minutes.

Mailing list larger than 5,000 is not allowed on SKGOLD® Hosting shared servers and will require a dedicated hosting solution from us. Please note that dividing one large list into smaller lists to get below this limit is not allowed as well. For the mailing list larger than 5,000 we recommend to use the third party mail list services and autoresponders.

Anytime you're sending a message, no matter how large your mailing list is, you must throttle it. We recommend you throttle it to 1 email every 8 seconds. (Sending 1 every 8 seconds would send 450 emails within 1 hour, keeping you below the 500 outgoing email limit.) If the mailing list software you're using does not allow you to throttle, you must switch to something else. We recommend phpList, which can be found in your control panel (cPanel) under the QuickInstall section. Without throttling you may crash the server, for example, 500 emails, the server will try sending all 500 in 1 second, which is not possible. This will cause the server load to go very high and the entire server will be sluggish until this process is completed. Anyone who choose not to throttle and causes the server's load to go high will be suspended without notice.

To prevent high server loads any mailing list over 800 emails only allowed to be send during off-peak times. Off peak times qualify as 1 AM - 8 AM Eastern Time on Monday through Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday.

You are not allowed to mail to a mailing list you were given or purchased. This is spamming because the subscribers never agreed to you personally sending them mail. We do not care and how you justify it; this is spam and will result in termination.

Online businesses that use e-mail marketing must follow all the CAN-SPAM and Canadian anti-spam rules:

• Use only a permission based email list.
• Identify your message as an advertisement.
• Include an unsubscribe mechanism.
• Include a valid physical postal address.
• Deceptive subject lines and false headers are outlawed.
• You will be held responsible if anyone sends emails on your behalf.

We take a zero tolerance against sending of Unsolicited Bulk Email. "Safe lists" and purchased lists, Facebook Fans or Friends, Twitter Followers, or LinkedIn Connections where the recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent will be treated as Unsolicited Bulk Email. Any Unsolicited Bulk Email being sent will result in termination of the offending account.

16. Indemnification

Customer agrees that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold SKGOLD® Hosting harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and claims, including reasonable attorney's fees asserted against SKGOLD® Hosting, its agents, its customers, officers and employees, that may arise or result from any service provided or performed or agreed to be performed or any product sold by customer, its agents, employees or assigns. Customer agrees to defend, indemnify and hold harmless any liabilities arising out of; (1) any injury to person or property caused by any products sold or otherwise distributed in connection with us; (2) any material supplied by customer infringing or allegedly infringing on the proprietary rights of a third party; (3) copyright infringement and (4) any defective products sold to customers from SKGOLD® Hosting server.

17. Disclaimer

SKGOLD® Hosting will not be responsible for any damages your business may suffer. SKGOLD® Hosting make no warranties of any kind, expressed or implied for services we provide. We disclaims any warranty or merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This includes loss of data resulting from delays, no deliveries, wrong delivery, and any and all service interruptions caused by SKGOLD® Hosting, our business partner(s) and our employees.

18. Disclosure to law enforcement agencies

SKGOLD® Hosting may, in its sole discretion, disclose your information upon lawful request from law enforcement agencies, if required to do so by law, court orders, or other legal process. SKGOLD® Hosting always fully cooperate with law enforcement agencies.

19. Changes to the Terms of Use

SKGOLD® Hosting reserves the right to modify this Terms of Use at any time with or without notice. It is solely your responsibility to review this statement on a regular basis to keep yourself aware of any changes.