Acceptable Use Policy
Some of our usage guidelines and restrictions.
General Conduct
Customers are prohibited from transmitting on or through any of Zenutech's services, any material that is, in Zenutech's sole discretion, unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, or hateful, or that encourages conduct which would constitute a criminal offence, give rise to civil liability, or otherwise violate any local, provincial, national or international law.
Zenutech's services may only be used for lawful purposes. Transmission or storage of any information, data or material in violation of regulation or law in New Brunswick Canada, or by the common law, is prohibited. Zenutech reserves the right to remove such illegal material from its servers.
The customer is responsible for keeping his billing data with Zenutech up-to-date and accurate. Providing false data on the signup form, contract, or online application, including fraudulent use of credit card numbers, is grounds for immediate termination, and may subject the offender to civil or criminal liability.
Abuse and Spam
The transmission of unsolicited or prohibited advertising or other content through electronic mail or inappropriate Usenet postings is forbidden. The use of Zenutech for unsolicited mass mailings or postings (commonly known as "Spam") by any customer will cause that customer's services to be terminated immediately and without warning, and the customer will be held legally responsible for the damages to Zenutech, both monetary and in reputation. The use of any other service to make such a mailing or posting, with any reference to Zenutech services (including but not limited to mailboxes, auto-responders, and Web pages), shall also be grounds for account termination and/or other actions as described above.
Misuse of Account Features [The following paragraph is applicable for Shared Linux Web Hosting clients only]
Operating any service that makes an account feature available to third parties for any use other than normal access to that account's Web site is forbidden. Operating any service that enables or assists anonymous or abusive behavior by third parties is forbidden. Operating any service that affects the stability or reliability of any Zenutech server or network component, impacts other users or the company negatively, or degrades quality of service is forbidden. This includes but is not limited to third party access to CGI services, database hosting, autoresponders, mailboxes, mail forwarding, mail filtering, and content publishing systems. All account features are to be used solely in order to develop and implement the Web site(s) associated with that account.
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This means that, for example, you cannot:
- Resell auto-responders to third parties
- Run an email hosting service
- Run a service like linkexchange.com
- Run a service like thecounter.com
- Run CGI scripts for other sites
- Host a remailer
The goal is to prevent the hosting of such services on our servers due to the excessive load that these can place on the server and the anonymous and potentially abusive behavior that these types of services can engender.
Resource Usage [The following paragraph is applicable for Shared Linux Web Hosting clients only]
Any website that uses a high amount of server resources (such as, but not limited to, CPU time, memory usage, and network resources) will be given an option of either paying extra (which depends on the resource needed) or reducing the resource used to an acceptable level. Zenutech shall be the sole and final arbiter of what is considered to be a high server usage level.
Users may not, through a cron job, CGI script, PHP script, interactive commands, remote program, or any other means, take the following actions on Zenutech servers:
- Run any process that requires more than 128MB of memory space.
- Run any program that requires more than 30 CPU seconds to complete.
- Run any CGI, PHP, or other type of script that forks or calls itself recursively and launches multiple processes per second.
- Run any process or program either locally or remotely that initiates POP3 logins at the rate of more than one per second.
- Run any process that uses 10% or more of system resources for longer than 30 seconds.
- Run any program that "fork bombs" or otherwise uses child processes in a manner that disrupts performance of the server, or in order to attempt to circumvent resource restrictions.
- Use the find command, or any similar tool which recursively explores directory structures, anywhere except in their own directories.
- Send out mail to more than 100 addresses in one batch, whether sequentially or in parallel. Such batches must "sleep" for at least three seconds between each delivery attempt.
- Send prohibitively large messages to any receiving system that cannot or does not wish to receive them. Large file transfers should be accomplished through FTP, not electronic mail.
- Resource limits may be enforced by automatic monitoring systems.
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System resource limits are intended to prevent runaway CGI scripts. Also, processes with large memory footprints or hungry CPU requirements will incur swapping and other system slowdowns that reduce server performance.
If we find that you are performing bulk mail delivery, regardless of whether it is Spam or not, we may choose or be forced to deactivate your account and investigate to prevent abuse.
Database Resource Usage
Zenutech reserves the right to require changes to database designs or usage methods in any case where such designs or methods are found to have an adverse impact on a database server and/or other databases on that server. Zenutech reserves the right to disable any database determined to be unacceptably harming performance of a database server.
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This policy exists in order to protect the integrity and performance of the database servers for all users.
Cron Usage
The use of "cron jobs", which are processes that are run automatically at certain times, in accordance with a "crontab" file set up by each user, are allowed on Zenutech servers, subject to the following conditions and restrictions:
- The account type must be Standard or higher.
- The job must not execute more often than once every ten minutes.
- The job must generate no greater impact than a CGI script.
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This policy exists to reduce server load by prohibiting behavior that can cause problems. However, it does still allow reasonable usage of cron.
Server Side Processes
The installation or operation of any stand-alone, unattended server-side processes or daemons on Zenutech servers, with the exception of cron jobs subject to their own policy, is forbidden, except by special arrangement. This specifically includes IRC bots or clients as well as any network redirector programs. Use of such a process to accept network connections, for any purpose whatsoever, is expressly forbidden. Violation of this policy may result in immediate account termination without warning.
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This policy exists for several reasons:
- To protect the CPU and memory resources available on each server.
- To protect and enhance system security by not allowing unapproved third-party programs to accept connections from the outside world.
- To allow us to be aware of any such programs, by requiring that special arrangements be made.
Security and Cracking
Use of Zenutech services to engage in any type of fraud, "cracking", malicious behavior, or harassment is expressly forbidden. Interference with the proper operation of systems reachable via the Internet is forbidden. Compliance with the acceptable use policies of any network or system with which you connect through our service is required. Forging e-mail, Usenet postings, or other messages is forbidden. Trafficking in pirated software is forbidden. Port scanning or the use of similar tools is forbidden.
Use of Zenutech services to publish or otherwise disseminate information about the availability of pirated software or other material that is being made available illegally, including the publication of a list of links to such material, regardless of disclaimers, is specifically forbidden. We do not condone or encourage any illegal material or behavior.
If inappropriate activity is detected, all accounts of the user in question will be deactivated until the investigation is complete. Prior notification to the user is not assured. We reserve the right to contact law enforcement regarding the activity.
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This policy simply requires that you use your accounts responsibly. Breaking into other systems, trying to break into ours, forging messages, swapping games with your friends - all of this is potentially illegal and inappropriate. Because of the potential legal and technical risks these activities can present to our service, we deactivate first, and ask questions later. This is necessary to protect our service for all customers.
Actions Taken by Zenutech
When Zenutech becomes aware of an alleged violation of its Acceptable Use Policy, Zenutech will initiate an investigation. During the investigation Zenutech may restrict Customer's access in order to prevent further possible unauthorized activity. Depending on the severity of the violation, Zenutech may, at its sole discretion, restrict, suspend, or terminate Customer's account and/or pursue other civil remedies. If such violation is a criminal offence, Zenutech may notify the appropriate law enforcement department(s) of such violation if we feel it is appropriate.
If you have any questions regarding your usage of Zenutech services, please contact our legal department by e-mail or by telephone at +1 866-936-8832. If you wish to report unlawful usage of Zenutech service by other individuals or entities, please use our online contact form.
Zenutech does not issue service credits for any outages incurred through service disablement resulting from Policy violations.