Terms of Service

  1. Any setup fees are nonrefundable.
  2. All fees are due in advance of the services provided. Failure to pay in advance may result in termination or suspension of services without notice.
  3. If you cancel your service no refund will be paid for any unused month. If you cancel your service but fail to transfer your site(s) to another provider and continue to utilize our hosting network you will be billed until such time that you are no longer utilizing our services. If you wish services to cease immediately, you must request that our services be discontinued immediately.
  4. Money-Back Guarantee – we offer a limited Money-Back Guarantee to all new clients. If we have failed to provide 99.99% server and network availability during the first 30 days of a new account being online and the client requests a refund by emailing [email protected], we will refund the pro-rated difference of the client’s hosting fees for the month. A month is defined as a 30 day period. For example, if a customer cancels on the third day of service they would receive a 27-day pro-rated refund or 90% of their payment. This refund will not include any payment fees paid by us to process your payment. In all other circumstances, monies paid to us are final and nonrefundable.
  5. Where payment is by credit or debit card you expressly authorise us to charge recurring billing by such method until we receive from you a completed account cancellation notice. If you dispute any payment made to us you shall contact us immediately to discuss repayment. In the event that you submit an unjustified chargeback, then the following shall be due and payable by you within 7 days for each instance of a chargeback: the charges due and payable by you for the Services used in the period covered by the chargeback; and such chargeback costs as are levied upon us by your bank or credit card company; and a chargeback administration fee of £50; and our reasonable costs and losses incurred in recovering the above-mentioned fees including debt recovery costs, legal fees and debt collection costs.
  6. The use of any data or material, which Customer receives from the service provided by clustered.uk, is at Customer’s sole and absolute risk. clustered.uk specifically disclaims and denies any responsibility for the completeness, or accuracy of quality of any and all information obtained through the services to be provided hereby.
  7. clustered.uk will utilize its best efforts to maintain acceptable performance of services, but clustered.uk makes absolutely no warranties whatsoever, express or implied, including the warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. clustered.uk cannot guarantee continuous service, service at any particular time, or integrity of data stored or transmitted via its system or via the Internet. clustered.uk will not be liable for the inadvertent disclosure of, or corruption or erasure of, data transmitted or received or stored on its system. clustered.uk shall not be liable to Customer or any of its customers for any claims or damages which may be suffered by Customer or its customers, including, but not limited to, losses or damages of any and every nature, resulting from the loss of data, inability to access Internet, or inability to transmit or receive information, caused by, or resulting from, delays, nondeliveries, or service interruptions.
  8. Customer agrees that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs, claims, including reasonable solicitor’s fees, (‘Liabilities’) against clustered.uk, its agents, its customers, servants, officers, employees, that may arise or result from any services provided, 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 clustered.uk against liabilities arising out of any injury to person or property caused by any products sold or distributed in connection with clustered.uk servers; and material supplied by Customer infringing or allegedly infringing on the proprietary rights of a third party; copyright infringement and any defective product which Customer sold on a clustered.uk server. As a result of this, Customer agrees that clustered.uk shall not be liable to Customer for any claims of actual, compensatory and/or consequential damages which may be suffered by Customer, including, but not limited to, losses or damages due to the loss of data resulting from delays, non deliveries, or service interruptions unless caused by the negligence of clustered.uk. Notwithstanding the above mentioned, Customer’s exclusive remedies, damages, losses and causes of actions shall not exceed the aggregate amount which Customer paid during the term of this Agreement.
  9. This section defines the network and host server Service Level Agreement (SLA). To Customers in good financial standing with Clustered (UK) Ltd, we guarantee that our network is available 99.99% and their host server is available 99.9% of the time in a given month, excluding scheduled maintenance. The network is defined as core network infrastructure excluding the hardware, services and software running on your server. The server is defined as the host hardware that houses the account. Downtime is measured from the moment the Customer notifies a clustered.uk support representative of a failure to the time the Network or Server responds to an external “ping” request. Notification of network failure must occur at the time of the outage and not after the fact.
    If network downtime exceeds 0.01% in a given month, the Customer will be credited 10% of their monthly hosting fee and an additional 10% for each additional hour of downtime up to 100% of the Customer ‘s monthly hosting fee.
    If server downtime exceeds 0.1% in a given month, the Customer will be credited 10% of their monthly hosting fee and an additional 10% for each additional hour of downtime up to 100% of the Customer ‘s monthly hosting fee.
    Credits shall not be provided to the Customer if network or server downtime is the result of a) scheduled maintenance b) circumstances beyond clustered.uk’s reasonable control, including, but not limited to: DDoS or other network attacks, upstream or 3rd party network outages, war, fire, flood, sabotage, labour disturbance, acts of government, acts of god or c) breaking this Agreement or clustered.uk’s Acceptable Use Policy.
  10. The Customer may only use clustered.uk’ services for lawful purposes. In the event that at any given time, clustered.uk believes that the service is being used by the Customer in contravention with any of the terms and provisions contained in this Agreement, clustered.uk has the right to immediately discontinue such service to Customer without liability other than to refund any unearned prepaid service fees. The following are restrictive uses and shall be cause for the immediate termination of web services and this Agreement without notice to the Customer:
    • Unauthorized distribution or copying copyrighted software, violation of UK export restrictions, embarrassment, fraud, trafficking in obscene material, drug dealing, and other illegal activities; Offering for sale or soliciting e-mail lists for the purposes of bulk e-mail.
    • Unsolicited advertising via email and/or ‘Spamming’ is a violation of this agreement. Such prohibited conduct subjects Customer to immediate termination of service as provided herein and the termination of this agreement without notice. clustered.uk reserves the right to report such illegal activities to any and all regulatory, administrative and/or governmental authorities for appropriate prosecution.
    • Using a non-existing email return address on a commercial solicitation, spamming (sending unsolicited advertising to numerous email addresses or newsgroups and/or generating a significantly higher volume of outgoing email than a normal user), trolling (posting outrageous messages to generate numerous responses, mailbombing (sending multiple messages without significant new content to the same user), subscribing someone else to a mailing list without that person’s permission, cross-posting articles to an excessive number of newsgroups, or attempting without authorization to enter into a secured computer system. clustered.uk reserves the right to determine what is internet abuse.
    • Tortuous conduct such as posting of defamatory, libellous, scandalous, or private information about a person without their consent, intentionally inflicting emotional distress or violating trademarks, copyright, or other intellectual property rights.
    • The Customer expressly understands and agrees that illegal Adult oriented Websites are expressly prohibited. clustered.uk reserves the right to immediately terminate and remove any such unauthorized Websites without notice and discontinue service to Customer without notice or liability for actual, compensatory or consequential damages to Customer for the interruption in service.
    • IRC is specifically prohibited.

11. clustered.uk will not be responsible for any damages your business may suffer. clustered.uk makes no warranties of any kind, expressed or implied for services we provide. clustered.uk disclaims any warranty or merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. The includes loss of data resulting from delays, non-deliveries, wrong delivery, and any and all service interruptions caused by clustered.uk and its employees. The services provided by clustered.uk are provided AS-IS and without any warranty expressed or implied. clustered.uk reserves the right to revise its policies at any time.

Chain letters, “make money fast” and other
Ponzi pyramid-selling schemes

These articles are similar to paper versions, where you add your name at the end of a list and send the message to lots of your friends. The person at the head of the list is typically sent some small amount of money and hopes to become rich. Simple mathematics shows why they do not work in theory, and a little thought about human nature will show you why they do not work in practice either. These schemes, even where they offer no financial or material reward are unacceptable abuse. They waste resources for Internet service providers and for the users who download them. If they do involve money they are also illegal in many countries – despite common claims to the contrary within their text.

Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE)

Unsolicited Commercial Email is advertising material sent and received by email without the recipient either requesting such information or otherwise explicitly expressing an interest in the material advertised. Since many Internet users use a dial-up connection and pay for their online time, it costs them money to receive an email. Receipt of unsolicited commercial advertising, therefore, costs them money and is often therefore particularly unwelcome. It should be noted that a user has not expressed an interest by the mere act of posting a news article in any particular newsgroup, or by visiting a website unless of course, they have made a specific request for information to be emailed to them.

Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE)

UBE is similar to the above UCE but is not attempting to sell anything. Forged Headers and / or Addresses Forging headers or messages means sending email such that its origin appears to be another user or machine, or a non-existent machine. It is also forgery to arrange for any replies to the email to be sent to some other user or machine. However, in either case, if prior permission has been granted to you by the other user or the administrators of the other machine, then there is no problem, and of course “null” reverse paths can be used as defined in the relevant email standards.

Mail Bombing

Mail bombing is the sending of multiple emails, or one large email, with the sole intent of annoying and / or seeking revenge on a fellow Internet user. It is wasteful of shared Internet resource as well as serving no value to the recipient. Due to the time taken to download it, sending a long email to sites without prior agreement can amount to a denial of service or denial of access to email at the receiving site. Note that adding binary attachments to email may increase its size considerably. If prior arrangement has not been made, the email may be extremely unwelcome.

Denial of Service Attacks

Denial of Service is any activity designed to prevent a specific host on the Internet making full and effective use of its facilities. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Mail bombing an address in such a way to make their Internet access impossible, difficult, or costly.
  • Opening an excessive number of email connections to the same host.
  • Intentionally sending email designed to damage the receiver’s systems when interpreted; for example, sending malicious programs or viruses attached to an email. sing a smart host or email relay without authorisation to do so.

Mailing List Subscriptions

Mailing lists are schemes for distributing copies of the same email to many different people. It is not acceptable to subscribe anyone, other than a user on your own host, to any mailing list or similar service, unless their explicit permission has been given. List owners are encouraged to confirm all subscription requests by requesting confirmation from the apparent subscriber before starting to send any list email. They must ensure that unsubscribe requests are handled efficiently. Good emailing list software is available that will automate both these processes. Many reports of unsolicited bulk email turn out to be from people who were unaware that they had joined a mailing list. It is not acceptable to subscribe people to a list merely because they have visited your web site or used one of your products; the person must make an explicit request to be listed. However, some reports occur because people have genuinely forgotten that they had made such a request. If you run a mailing list you are strongly advised to keep copies of administrative requests (weblogs, or emails including headers) so that you may demonstrate that subscription requests were genuine.

Illegal Content

Various Acts of Parliament make it illegal to possess or transmit certain material on a public telecommunications network, such as the telephone system. It is not acceptable to send such material by email.

Breach of Copyright or Intellectual Property

If you send copyright material or other intellectual property via email you must have permission to do so from the owner of that intellectual property.

Appendix C: Customers Websites

This Appendix is applicable to all services provided by Clustered. There are some further Appendices applicable to particular services below. You are responsible in all respects for the content of your web site and must ensure that no applicable law is violated. You must obtain any necessary legal permission for any works that your web site may include. You will be held responsible for and accept responsibility for any defamatory, confidential, secret or other proprietary material available via your web site. Clustered reserves the right to remove any material from a web site at our sole discretion, without prior notice and without explanation. A web site may not be used to offer, advertise or distribute any of the following types of material:

  • software for sending ‘spam’ (bulk emails, excessive news postings, etc.);
  • illegal material
  • lists of email addresses, except where all the owners of the addresses have given you explicit permission
  • any collection of personal data other than in accordance with the Data Protection Acts 1984 and 1998.

You must comply with the Data Protection Acts 1984 and 1998 (and any amendments or re-enactments of them) regarding all information received, stored or communicated through the use of your web site. If your web site contains material that may cause general offence, a clearly readable warning page must be shown before any such offensive material is displayed. To avoid doubt, this means that your top-level web page (usually index.htm or index.html) must not contain any adult material or other material that may generally offend. Where part of a web site forms an independent area that is not linked to by a topmost page, it will be considered as a site in its own right when considering whether appropriate warnings are present. Warnings are also required where the material is referenced directly from a web site, with no intervening pages, or where the use of frames makes the material appear to be part of a web site. All of the web pages on a web site are considered to be publicly visible and may be downloaded by any person, whether or not they are linked from any central contents or home page. However, specific mechanisms are available as part of some services to prevent unauthorized access. Pages protected in such a manner will not be considered to be public. Web sites may not be advertised by you, or by another person, using techniques that would be classified as “abuse” if they were carried out from a Clustered account including, but not limited to, bulk emailing and excessive news posting. Such action will be treated under the Clustered AUP as if it had been done from the Clustered account. Web sites must display a valid, up-to-date email contact address for the person responsible for the site. The use of the generic address of “webmaster” is acceptable for this purpose. This address must appear on the top-level page or be easily locatable from the top-level page.