Lessel Web Hosting - Terms of Service (TOS)

Last Updated December 09, 2009

There are no hidden fees so if you are searching for them in small print, just a head's up. Use of Lessel Web Hosting's Service constitutes acceptance and agreement to Lessel Web Hosting's AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) as well as Lessel Web Hosting's TOS (Terms of Service). From herewith in this TOS, AUP, and SLA, the usage of "us", "we", "our", "ours" shall constitute reference to Lessel Web Hosting, the usage of "you", "your", "they", "them" shall refer to client / customer of Lessel Web Hosting.

Acceptance of Contractual Agreement

1. Client agrees that by placing an order either by means of electronic ordering (web order form or instant messenging) or signing a written contract, and receipt of such order by Lessel Web Hosting, that you are agreeing to our TOS, AUP, and SLA. No Modifications of said contract by customer is allowed.

2. Lessel Web Hosting will provide, and Customer will purchase and pay for, the Services, and service fees specified in the Order for the applicable Service Description. Customer acknowledges that the service, and service fees have been communicated to the customer, and that they are aware of all applicable charges as per contract, AUP, SLA, and TOS. Customer also understands that any promotional offers unless specified in contractual terms will not be applicable to their individual service.

3. In connection with any Hosting Services, if Customer's actual bandwidth usage in any month exceeds allotted amount, specified in Customer's contract, Customer will pay Lessel Web Hosting any additional fees as specified in the Service Description within three (3) days of invoicing period. Any bandwidth overage will subject the server and services to suspension until bill is paid.

4. We reserve the right to discontinue and/or refuse to provide service to any client or party at our sole discretion.

5. All stated terms contained within this contractual agreement are subject to change without prior written notice as any updates may openly be viewed at our site, http://www.lessel.us/. In addition, we reserve the right to make modifications to such terms contained herein at our sole discretion as deemed necessary by management.

What may not be hosted on our network:

Illegally posted materials will not be tolerated on our network. These include:
- Warez
- IRC
- Hacking tools / material
- Copyrighted Software
- Child pornography
- Credit Card Fraud Information
- Copyrighted media, includes but not limited to: Video, Music, TV, Radio
- Anything that may harm us, the server, or anyone else (mentally, physically)

If you find any of the above materials hosted on one of our web servers, please report it to abuse@lessel.us.
Additionally, we reserve the right to ban the use of applications which allow the proliferation of unsolicited email from our network, or which decrease the performance of our servers thus bearing on the quality of service we may provide to other customers.

Network Uptime

Network Uptime is the total time in a calendar month that Lessel Web Hosting network is available through the Internet, provided that Client has established connectivity. Lessel Web Hosting takes responsibility for Network availability within their network, however, we cannot be held liable for upstream problems, outside of our network. Our guarantee is that our Network will be available to clients free of Network Outages, that render 100% packet loss, 99% of each calendar month.

Network Outages

Outages or Unscheduled Downtime is any unplanned or unscheduled interruption in Service availability during which Client is unable to access the services as described in the section titled "Network Uptime" above. A Network Outage is defined as a period in which 100% packet loss to our network is experienced, which is determined to have been caused by a problem in Lessel Web Hosting's Network as confirmed by Lessel Web Hosting. Downtime or outages are measured as the total length of time of the unplanned interruption in service availability in a calendar month.

Scheduled Downtime

Scheduled Downtime is any Lessel Web Hosting scheduled interruption of Services, for the purpose of network upgrades, or replacement of any equipment in order to provide for you better service. Scheduled downtime occurs during notified downtime periods, with as much advance warning as possible via e-mail with a minimum of 12- 24 hours notice.

SLA Network Violation Credit

http://www.lessel.us/sla.html

Performance Credit exclusions

The following are excluded from the monthly calculation of Service Availability:

Resellers:

Reseller confidentiality and support agreement:
We, Lessel Web Hosting, provide our resellers an opportunity to resell and manage services resold to third parties. Your name, company or private, in relation to Lessel Web Hosting will be kept anonymous as best possible.
As a reseller of services, you, the reseller, are responsible to provide direct support to your clients. Please be advised that we, Lessel Web Hosting, will not provide third party technical support to the clients of resellers and are not responsible to provide such under any circumstance.

Account Transfers and Fees:

We only accept requests for hosting account transfers which are hosted on cPanel servers version 3 and above. cPanel account transfers are free for up to 10 accounts. Each cPanel account transfer over 10 will require a $1.00 fee per each account. Transfers are not guaranteed as remote server problems and other issues may render cPanel account transfer impossible. In such cases a refund will be made for any transfer fees paid. In the event that data is missing in new account after transfer, Lessel Web Hosting will not be held responsible for such data loss.

Domain Name Purchases:

All domain names purchased and/or registered through Lessel Web Hosting remain the sole property of Lessel Web Hosting and must be used with our hosting services. Ownership of a domain name may be transfered to the client only through a separate, subsequent agreement.

Payment:

Establishment of this service is contingent upon receipt of payment from Customer to Lessel Web Hosting. Subsequent payments are due on the anniversary date of the month for that month's service, unless customer requests all monthly payments to be consolidated to one specific billing date. Any additional services relative to a primary hosting account, will be prorated to the primary hosting account's monthly recurring billing date, along the following guidelines of prorating methodology: (total monthly fees/ 30) * number of days to monthly recurring billing cycle. Any setup fees will be charged full setup fee pricing, and are applied at time of initial request of such services.

Delinquent Accounts:

Lessel Web Hosting may temporarily deny service or terminate this Agreement upon failure of Customer to pay charges when due. Such termination or denial will not relieve customer of responsibility for the payment of all accrued service fees, or any collection fees.

Credit cards that are declined for any reason are subject to a $10.00 declination fee.

All accounts that become more than 5 days past due will be charged a $15.00 late fee.

Service will be interrupted on accounts that reach 10+ days past due.

Accounts that are not collectable by Lessel Web Hosting will be turned over to an outside agency for collections. If your account is turned over for collection, you agree to pay the company a "Processing and Collection" fee of not less than fifty dollars ($50.00) and no more than one hundred, fifty dollars ($150.00)

Delinquent Reseller Accounts:

Should your reseller account become delinquent, and payment not made to Lessel Web Hosting, resulting in a suspension of service you will have 48 hours to make restitution for the delinquent balance. Any account left unpaid after 48 hours of suspension and reseller not contacting the Lessel Web Hosting billing department to resolve the issue will allow for the reseller's client to be able to purchase the server directly, and assume financial responsibility from that point forward. The balance must be paid entirely by the client prior to lifting the service suspension. Resellers shall not hold Lessel Web Hosting responsible for failure to appropriately pay their invoices in a timely manor set forth in your original contracts.

Account Cancellation:

All requests for canceling any service(s) must be made in writing with at least 7 days notice but not more than 30 days prior to when services need to be stopped. A written email to sales@lessel.us is required to complete your request. If a termination request is submitted less than 7 days before the renewal date for the account, the client will be held liable for any charges that are automatically charged to the account for hosting while the request is in our que.
When submitting a termination request, include your domain name and the last name on the credit card being billed for services in your email.

All termination requests must be sent from the person listed on file as the owner of the account. Any outside requests will be rejected.

Termination requests sent to any other location other than sales@lessel.us are invalid.

Refunds and Disputes:

All payments to Lessel Web Hosting are nonrefundable. This includes any setup fees, monthly fees, and yearly hosting fees regardless of usage. All billing disputes must be reported within 30 days of the time the dispute occurred. Disputed charges to your credit card issuer, also known as charge backs, in Lessel Web Hosting's discretion which is valid, under the terms and conditions of our SLA, AUP, and TOS, will result in service interruption, and reconnection fees to restore the desired service.

Suspension and Cancellation:

Company 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. Company reserves the sole right to suspend service to any Customer located in our datacenter for violation of the AUP without notice. Company reserves the right to terminate service without notice for any violations of the AUP.

Violations of the AUP will result in the following:

72 hours is the standard notification; situations involving law enforcement, phishing, fraud, password harvesting, network interference, Denial or Disruption of service, IRC mis-use, or other malicious activity can reduce the notification time frame.
Failure to resolve the AUP violation within 72 hours will result in the following:

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


Pro-rated refunds are only issued in regards to upgrades and downgrades of an existing hosting plan. Payments made on a monthly or yearly basis after upgrade are still nonrefundable, however the customer is not obligated to continue their subscription past the month or year last paid for.

Dedicated Server Restore:

Lessel Web Hosting is not responsible for the restoration of data to server. We strongly recommend that your purchase backup options for your server, and keep copies of your data off-site with you for emergency purposes. If hardware failure and data loss occurs, you the client are responsible for data restoration. Lessel Web Hosting shall not be liable for loss of data under any circumstance.

Hardware Replacement

Hardware replacement will occur within 1 - 8 hours of the reported problem, Lessel Web Hosting will refund 5% of the monthly fee per additional 8 hours of down time (up to 100% of customer's monthly fee). In order to reduce replacement hardware downtime, we keep a small quantity of pre-built systems on hand to swap out hard disks, so that your server can be back up in the shortest amount of time. For hard disk failures, we keep pre-installed drives with our standard partitioning for immediate deployment. In order to request an SLA hardware violation credit, you must email sales, within 10 days of reported violation, at: sales@lessel.us. SLA violations will be reviewed by our personnel Monday - Friday 9AM to 5PM EST. *Hardware SLA violations do not cover network violation*

Bandwidth usage and limitations:

All server plans include an allocated continuous data transfer rate of 3.75 Mbps in a 30-day calendar month, which is an approximate quantity of 1,200 GB of data transfer. If your monthly average usage exceeds the bandwidth transfer rate of 4.0 Mbps within your 30 day billing cycle, you will be billed for total average usage based on 95th percentile metering and will be liable for overages exceeding your monthly allocation. In accordance to these terms of service, you, the client, agree to pay such overages at the rate of $75.00 per 1 Mbps. If you anticipate high bandwidth usage, please contact our sales department, sales@lessel.us, for further information on the availability of other plans with higher bandwidth transfer allocations. Note: 1 Mbps of continuous transfer in a 30 day period ~ 320 GB of data transfer. Further in-depth information on 95th percentile metering may be found on the following site: http://www.seanadams.com/95/.

Dedicated Server Cancellations

We require at least 7 days notification before your next monthly billing cycle. Please email the sales department at sales@lessel.us. If you fail to process cancelation 7 days prior, the next month will be charged and canceled at the end of the billing cycle.

Resource Abuse Policy

Any website on our shared servers that uses a high amount of server resources (CPU, memory usage, and network resources) will be given an option to pay for a dedicated server. The abuse and misuse of system resources is a serious problem, and Lessel Web Hosting does not tolerate it. Accounts on a shared server must be shared with other users, so we must limit how much of the CPU and memory that can be used by any one account.

In all fairness, we cannot allow one or two clients to use all of the system resources on a shared machine and have all other clients suffer because of it. Excessive CPU & memory usage by one or more clients causes extreme slowness in all areas: MySQL, Email, HTTP and more. If the CPU & memory usage by a few clients gets out of hand, all sites hosted on the machine will return errors and not be accessible in any way.

AVERAGE SERVER RESOURCE LIMITS
Memory usage may not exceed 10% per domain/file/application
CPU usage may not exceed 20% per domain/file/application
Apache connections may not exceed 30 connections
15 MySQL maximum user connections allowed
350 emails per hour, per domain

There are special exceptions to these rules to be determined at the time we discover abuse. There are different combinations of usage that can create problems and other special cases. At any given time a server is unstable and an account is found to be the cause, we reserve the right to suspend the account to keep the server online and operating normally. If the usage is an increasing trend, we recommend the user invest in a dedicated server so the website can grow at a normal rate without restriction.

SUSPENSIONS
In the event your website has been suspended for resource abuse (abuse that cannot be resolved by removing/changing a script, etc.) and you do not wish to upgrade to a dedicated server to accommodate your site needs, we will only release the suspension within 24-48 hours. This is to ensure the CPU intensive site slows down in traffic to avoid further damage and problems. A backup will then be provided of your files or you will be allowed FTP/cPanel access for a certain time period. Any questions about our abuse policy may be answered by emailing our abuse department at abuse@lessel.us.

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