Terms & Conditions

Our Terms of Service are printed below. Our policy is the latest version of our terms of service will always be here. Please note although this document is comprehensive it exists for the benefit of all our customers. 99.7% of websites hosted with us never cause a problem and are never in breach of these terms and conditions. Please contact us if you require any clarification or additional information on any aspects of these terms of service.

Please note: All prices quoted on our website exclude UK VAT where applicable.
Please note websites of an ADULT nature are not allowed on our network. Please do not sign up such sites as when we discover them they will be terminated with no refund due.

Our terms of service are broadly similar to our Data Centre Terms of Service. This is deliberate on our part to ensure any websites hosted on our servers are not in breach of our Data Centre Policies.

Privacy

BWF Hosting Ltd will not sell, distribute, reveal, or otherwise make available any customer information. Should we need to contact you directly regarding your specific account or service we will do so via email only. If you are a member of our forum, you may receive mailings from us. You are free to request to not receive forum notifications/emails at any time by contacting us through our support system.

Money Back Guarantee

Shared and Reseller Accounts
If for any reason you are unhappy with the services you receive from BWF Hosting Ltd during the first 30 days of service, you may request in writing via email using the email address registered with is that your services be discontinued at which time you will receive a full refund (minus any domain name fees). If you are unhappy with a reseller account we will refund one months subscription upon request at time of cancellation.

New Accounts

All new web hosting accounts purchased are set up within 24 hours by our account administrators. You will receive an email including login details after your purchase. Due to unforeseen complications with various mail servers and any connection problems between your ISP and BWF Hosting Ltd, this process may sometimes be delayed.

Domain Names and Domain Transfers

For the registration of .uk domain names it is a condition of the registry that you accept their policies and rules which are located here – if you do not accept these policies and rules then unfortunately you will be unable to register a domain from the .uk family.

In order for your domain name to point to the BWF Hosting Ltd server your new account is located on, you must change your DNS (Domain Name Servers) at your registrar. If you purchase a domain name from us we will do that for you. If you supply your own domain name you must make the changes yourself.

Clients may register domain names through our system and domains should become active within your client area for management within 24 hours of payment being cleared. In the unlikely event a domain name appears not to register successfully please contact us so we can troubleshoot. Clients are responsible for renewing their domain names. BWF Hosting Ltd does not take responsibility for failing to register or renew domain names and you must remember to check and contact us accordingly if your domain name does not register or renew. You may check that domains have been registered or renewed within your client area domains section. As a courtesy we will email clients whose accounts and domains are about to expire 60 and 30 days prior to expiry date but we cannot guarantee you will receive these emails. If your domain name was registered via our company, you must check and take appropriate actions to renew a domain that is about to expire. Please contact us through our support system with specific questions regarding this.

When you register a domain name your details are passed to the domain registrar who administers the domain name you have purchased. They will store your details in the relevant who is database. This database is in the public domain. You can hide your details from the who is database and you have the option at time of purchase to do this – there is a small fee for this. You can also add this at any time from your client area or by contacting our sales team. If you have any questions about the who is opt out process please reach out to our sales team and we will be more than happy to assist.

Payments

We prefer PayPal payments to [email protected]. We also accept cheques and address details can be obtained from our support system. Postal Orders and Cash can be sent entirely at your own risk as we do not accept any responsibility for money sent through the post.

Where payments are not received, PayPal payments are reversed or cheques bounce we reserve the right to initially suspend your account and keep control of your domain until all monies owed are paid to us. Where accounts are not renewed and paid for we will initially suspend the account on renewal date and will delete all files 30 days later from our server. This allows customers time to pay due money and retrieve their files.

Cancellations

Shared and Reseller Accounts – If you wish to cancel your services, you must provide written notification to us via our support ticket system. You must ensure you take any appropriate backups prior to cancellation as once an account is cancelled on our servers no files will be available.

Dedicated servers – We require a 5-day cancellation notice prior to billing.

If you cancel your account and your payments still continue for any reasons such as 1) by fault of BWF Hosting Ltd 2) by fault of the credit card processor 3) by fault of any other payment collection company we are not responsible for any overdraft fees that are issued by your financial institution.

Overage Charges

Our service plans are designed to accommodate the majority of usage scenarios given the needs of our customers. However, your usage may vary and require additional allocations, specifically in the areas of storage and traffic. We will never charge your card automatically if your account requires more resources. You must keep your email address updated within your cPanel, so that you may receive an email when your account reaches certain limits determined solely by our system, ie. bandwidth exceedment warning at 80% at which time you may contact us to purchase a higher transfer quota for your account. If you do not contact us, the system will suspend your site if your allotments exceed.

Content

BWF Hosting Ltd believes in freedom of speech; however, any content (written, visual, or implied) in the following areas will not be tolerated and is grounds for immediate suspension of service racism or prejudice due to colour, creed, or belief; any violent/malicious/obscene content written, visual or implied. We will not tolerate any type of hate site including terrorist related websites on our network. If we receive notice that there is such a hate site hosted within our network, the customer hosting the material will be notified immediately. They are required to remove the content within a certain timeframe or will face account suspension and/or termination. We do not allow HYIP or AUTOSURF sites. Any content that at our discretion is not legal in the United Kingdom are not allowed. Adult sites are not allowed. BWF Hosting Ltd will be the final judge in what we perceive to be acceptable and will not enter into any discussion with customers regarding this. You agree to these terms when paying for a hosting account with us and if you do not agree to this we kindly ask you do not buy hosting from us.

We prefer that you self-govern your content and remain responsible and all-knowing of your website publicly provides. Even if other users have access to your account, you are responsible for their actions. This is particularly true of forums. We discourage users to have forums in place that could give rise to allegations of libel or hate crime. Due to past experiences and threats of legal action we do quickly suspend accounts where we receive complaints about forums and you buy hosting in full knowledge of this. The resources and time needed to govern our servers by checking each website individually, which have growing and evolving content, is impossible. However, if BWF Hosting Ltd is made aware of any questionable content on a BWF Hosting Ltd -hosted site, we will address the concerns immediately and directly with you to seek an amiable resolution.

Where our staff members are spending time dealing with complaints about content on your website we reserve the right to ask you to seek alternative hosting provision. Whilst we 100% believe in freedom of speech we are also a small business and if our staff are spending time dealing with complaints about website content this is not good business. Where we ask you to find an alternative hosting provider we will fully refund any money paid for your hosting service remaining in your contract. By taking hosting from us you agree that we reserve the right at any time to ask you to find alternative hosting provision where we are losing money from your site through abnormal support time or staff time dealing with complaints.

In all cases of abuse we will seek advice from the Abuse and Security department of our data centre partner. They will have the ultimate final word on anything as our servers are leased from them and ‘technically’ do not belong to BWF Hosting Ltd. If our data centre instructs us to suspend a website we need to comply to ensure they do not suspend an entire server. Again you buy hosting from us on this clear understanding that sometimes the need to suspend a website is entirely out of our hands.

Full Management

We offer fully managed dedicated servers, VPS servers and cloud servers. We regularly get asked what fully managed means. This support document is designed to clarify what we will assist with in terms of your server.

  • Kernel Upgrades, OS patches
  • Backups and restoration help if needed (only on servers with 2 or more drives or with purchased remote backup)
  • cPanel/WHM Updates
  • PHP updates
  • MySQL updates
  • System pre installed services updates. ( we do not update 3rd party scripts installed)
  • WHM/cPanel assistance includes but not limited to, creating, deleting, setting up, email and DNS
  • PHP compilation
  • SSL configuration and installation
  • Custom DNS configuration
  • Email troubleshooting
  • FTP troubleshooting
  • High Server Load troubleshooting
  • Best Effort Third Party Application Support
  • Hardware Replacement SLA 2-6 hours
  • Compromised Server Recovery to the best of our ability
  • Software Firewall Installation and Configuration
  • Failed Drive service restoration, we will assist in restoring of all accounts to our ability
  • Database corruption assistance
  • Assistance with system alerts or warnings
  • Hands on help with preinstall system settings
  • High Bandwidth consultation needs
  • Third Party Software

We promise best effort assistance with third party scripts installed to the best of our ability. We cannot give any guarantees surrounding our ability to solve problems with third party scripts (such as WordPress) but we will try our best to help. Our primary goal is to provide a server that works and is configured as you request and any third party assistance falls outside our ‘full management’ remit but we will do our best in all cases.

Liabilities

BWF Hosting Ltd, makes no endorsement, claims, or promises regarding the services offered by our customers and will not be held liable for any disputes or claims against said customers. In no event shall BWF Hosting Ltd be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, special and exemplary damages, or any damages whatsoever, arising from the use or performance of a customer web site or from any information, services or products provided through a customer web site. If there is questionable content on any server in our network, we will not take any action against any material or action until the website is brought to our attention by emailing our abuse department at [email protected].

Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)

BWF Hosting Ltd is dedicated to providing top quality service at a very affordable price. The conditions which follow are necessary to ensure that we may continue to provide the best possible service to all of our customers whilst at the same time satisfying our legal and ethical responsibilities.

Failure to follow any condition will be grounds for immediate account deactivation without notice. BWF Hosting Ltd will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of any of these provisions.

Activity which results in the suspension or deactivation of an account will result in a forfeiture of all fees paid. Complaints made regarding abuses of an account will be investigated and if found guilty will be grounds for immediate suspension.

To report suspected abuses or any violations of these policies, please contact our abuse department at [email protected]

Illegal Usage

BWF Hosting Ltd servers may be used for lawful purposes only. Transmission, storage, or distribution of any information, data or material in violation of any applicable law or regulation is prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to: copyrighted material, trademark, trade secret or other intellectual property right used without proper authorisation, and material that is obscene, defamatory, constitutes an illegal threat, or violates export control laws. Examples of non-acceptable content or links: Pirated software, Hackers programs or archives, Warez sites, MP3, and IRC bots. Any type of forum/discussion board discussing where to obtain such files or one that distributes the files is also prohibited. The subscriber to BWF Hosting Ltd service agrees to indemnify and hold harmless BWF Hosting Ltd from any claims resulting from the use of the service that damages the subscriber or any other party. BWF Hosting Ltd will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of this provision.

Illegal Content

BWF Hosting Ltd does not allow background Daemons such as IRC bots; eggdrop; BitchX; XiRCON; and any other program that interferes with normal server operation. No warez is allowed. Web proxies are not tolerated. This includes NPH-Proxy, and web proxy. If your site is found to hold any proxy files, your account will be suspended. When using an account with shell, you are not allowed to run ANY servers or services on the BWF Hosting Ltd network. Servers are defined as perlbots, proxies, BitchX, psyBnc, root exploits, DDoS scripts, Shoutcast servers, etc. Running any of these will face an immediate suspension. BWF Hosting Ltd reserves the right to terminate an account for these activities also.

Software Distribution

BWF Hosting Ltd web hosting accounts are not to be used for the purposes of distributing software and multimedia products. If you wish to distribute software and/or multimedia files, please contact our sales department through our support system for special arrangements. A normal shared account is not designed for such use.

File Usage & Storage

BWF Hosting Ltd web hosting accounts are not to be used for the purposes of distributing files to many people. Using your storage space for personal storage is perfectly acceptable. We do not place any restrictions on using your hosting space for file storage but we remind all clients of our standard shared hosting resource abuse policy where accounts cannot use in excess of reasonable server resources.

Chat Rooms

BWF Hosting Ltd does not allow chat rooms on shared hosting environments. You may elect for a dedicated server to run a chat room efficiently. Chat rooms place a high CPU and Memory use on shared servers and can have a detrimental effect on other customers.

IRC

BWF Hosting Ltd does not allow IRC or IRC bots to be operated on our shared or reseller servers. They are allowed on dedicated servers provided that no negative effects occur to our network.

Security

Users are prohibited from violating or attempting to violate the security of the BWF Hosting Ltd Network. Violations of system or network security may result in civil or criminal liability. BWF Hosting Ltd will investigate occurrences, which may involve cooperation with police authorities in prosecuting Users who are involved in such violations. These violations include, without limitation:

1) Accessing data not intended for such user or logging into a server or account, which such user is not authorised to access,
2) Attempting to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of a system or network or to breach security or authentication measures without proper authorisation,
3) Attempting to interfere with service to any user, host or network, including, without limitation, via means of overloading, “flooding”, “mail bombing” or “crashing”,
4) Forging any TCP/IP packet header or any part of the header information in any e-mail or forum posting,
5) Taking any action in order to obtain services to which such User is not entitled,
6) Attempting to couple many hosting packages together to take advantage of massive space or bandwidth allocations,

Server Abuse

Any attempts to undermine or cause harm to a BWF Hosting Ltd server or customer of BWF Hosting Ltd is strictly prohibited. Any sub-networks of BWF Hosting Ltd and dedicated servers must adhere to the above policies. The failure to meet or follow any of the above guidelines are grounds for account deactivation. We reserve the right to remove any account without prior notice.

Client Responsibility

The client is responsible for all activity originating from the account unless proven to be a victim of outside hacking or address forgery. The client is responsible for securing their username/password. The client assumes responsibility for all material on their site that may be put on by a third party (such as the usage of Free For All links pages). Use of BWF Hosting Ltd service requires a certain level of knowledge in the use of Internet languages, protocols, and software. This level of knowledge varies depending on the anticipated use and desired content of the web space by the client. The following examples are offered: Web Publishing: requires knowledge of HTML, properly locating and linking documents, FTPing Web contents, Graphics, text, sound, image mapping, etc. FrontPage web publishing: knowledge of the FrontPage tools as well as Telnet and FTP understanding and capability. CGI-Scripts: requires a knowledge of the UNIX environment, TAR & GUNZIP commands, Perl, CShell scripts, permissions, etc. Mail: a use of mail clients to receive and send mail, etc. The client agrees that he or she has the necessary knowledge to create and maintain their web space. Client agrees that it is not the responsibility of BWF Hosting Ltd to provide this knowledge or support outside matter specific to BWF Hosting Ltd servers.

Backups

BWF Hosting Ltd takes steps to maintain system integrity. However, BWF Hosting Ltd shall not be held responsible for loss of data due to any cause. To ensure the highest level of data protection, BWF Hosting Ltd recommends that ALL information be backed up on your own computer. As with any data that you hold a high importance to, it should be in more than one location at all times. All BWF Hosting Ltd data backups are designed against hardware failure not customer user error. We do take backups of all shared and reseller servers onto a separate hard drive within the server on a weekly basis but we cannot guarantee backups will work properly. This should protect data in most eventualities but we cannot guarantee to get your data back should data be lost for any reason and by using our service you agree to this. VPS clients need to ensure they have a backup solution in place either from us or from a third party provider. We do promise best efforts in dealing with hardware failure and loss of data.

We sell remote backup accounts and we strongly advise clients to take all steps they can to protect their data from loss. Where remote backup accounts are bought the client is responsible for checking that backups are working. We will set up the backups initially and test them but clients should periodically check with us (open a ticket) to confirm that backups are running. Alternatively clients can get a backup server with a private IP and can therefore check themselves periodically. We are not liable for any data loss on our network and clients are responsible for taking appropriate backups and ensuring the backups are up to date. Our remote backup accounts are sold at cost as a courtesy to clients (eg. £5 for cp remote license plus 50GB space) and no backups are guaranteed.

Actions Taken

The failure by a customer to meet or follow any of the above policies/terms is grounds for account deactivation. BWF Hosting Ltd will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of the AUP. BWF Hosting Ltd reserves the right to remove any account without prior notice.

When BWF Hosting Ltd becomes aware of an alleged violation of its AUP, BWF Hosting Ltd will initiate an investigation. During the investigation, BWF Hosting Ltd may restrict a customer’s access in order to prevent further potentially unauthorised activity. Depending on the severity of the violation, BWF Hosting Ltd may, at its sole discretion, restrict, suspend, or terminate a customer’s web hosting account. If such violation is a criminal offence, BWF Hosting Ltd will notify the appropriate police authorities of such violation.

BWF Hosting Ltd does not issue credits for outages incurred through service disablement resulting from AUP violations.

BWF Hosting Ltd customers agree to indemnify and hold harmless BWF Hosting Ltd from any claims resulting from the use of our services that damages them or any other party. The BWF Hosting Ltd service is provided on an as is, as available basis without warranties of any kind, either express or implied, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. BWF Hosting Ltd expressly disclaims any representation or warranty that the BWF Hosting Ltd hosting and domain registration service will be error-free, secure or uninterrupted. No oral advice or written information given by BWF Hosting Ltd, its employees, licensors or the like, will create a warranty; nor may you rely on any such information or advice. BWF Hosting Ltd and its partners and suppliers will not be liable for any cost or damage arising either directly or indirectly from any transaction or use of the service.

Modification

BWF Hosting Ltd reserves the right to add, delete, or modify any provision of this policy at any time without notice. The updated terms of service will be available from the BWF Hosting Ltd website or can be emailed to you by request to: [email protected].

Refusal Of Service

We reserve the right to refuse, cancel, or suspend service at our sole discretion. An example of refusal of service is if an account continues to abuse our policies after warnings. Refusal, cancellation or suspension of services especially holds true to issues with spam or any script abuse. Another example of refusal of service is if a customer becomes very unreasonable, unprofessional, extremely difficult to work with or threatening. Said customer’s account will be suspended and we will recommend to the customer to find a new host. A backup of the account(s) will be provided in this case.

Resource Abuse Policy (RAP)

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 BWF Hosting Ltd 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 Usage Limits

  • Memory usage may not exceed 10% per domain/file/application
  • CPU usage may not exceed 10% 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 [email protected]

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Coverage

This web site availability service level agreement (SLA) applies to you if you have ordered any hosting plan (“service”) and you are in good financial standing with BWF Hosting Ltd

Service Level

BWF Hosting Ltd endeavours to have network connectivity available for http access by third parties 99% of the time (“web site availability”). We simply endeavour to achieve this goal and in the past 12 months we have achieved this on all our servers. However, we cannot offer any guarantees. If you require a guaranteed service we recommend looking elsewhere. We cannot be held responsible financially or otherwise should your website not be available for a period of time.

Credits

In the event that there is no web site availability, BWF Hosting Ltd will credit the monthly service charge for the service as calculated below and as measured 24 hours a day in a calendar month. The maximum credit is not to exceed the monthly service charge for the affected month (total yearly cost paid minus domain cost if applicable divided by 12):

Web site availability credit

  • 95% to 99% = 25%
  • 90% to 94.9% = 50%
  • 89.9% or below = 100%

In order for you to receive a credit on your account, you must request such credit within seven (7) business days after you experienced no web site availability so that we may check our stats and your stats. You must request credit by contacting our support team through our support ticket system. For security, the body of this message must contain your domain name, the dates and times of the unavailability of your web site, and such other customer identification requested by BWF Hosting Ltd. Credits will usually be applied within sixty (60) days of your credit request. Credit to your account shall be your sole and exclusive remedy in the event that there is no web site availability.

Restrictions

Credits shall not be provided to you in the event that you have no web site availability resulting from (i) scheduled maintenance, (ii) your behaviour or the performance or failure of your equipment, programs or applications, or (iii) circumstances beyond BWF Hosting Ltd reasonable control, including, without limitation, acts of any governmental body, war, insurrection, sabotage, embargo, fire, flood, strike or other labour disturbance, interruption of or delay in transportation, unavailability of interruption or delay in telecommunications or third party services (including DNS propagation), failure of third party software or hardware or inability to obtain raw materials, supplies, or power used in or equipment needed for provision of your Web Site.

Limitations

Online problems occur continuously. There might come a time when you cannot access your website or any other service. This is not necessarily due to BWF Hosting Ltd. Perhaps your ISP is experiencing technical difficulties, or there might be a routing problem between your ISP and the data centre utilised by BWF Hosting Ltd, making communication difficult or impossible. We cannot bear the responsibility of such problems. Our monitoring agents determine the uptime of our service, and not any one client’s experience.

  • Mail Policy
  • POP Checks Per Hour

In a shared hosting environment, having a few hundred POP3 accounts check mail every minute is abusive to the server and can increase server load. If you do not need to auto-check your mail accounts, please disable the feature in your email client and manually check your mail when needed. Because of users that do need to check their mail very often, we have to impose a mail policy for everyone’s sake. This portion of our mail policy deals directly with POP checks per hour, per domain. Our default allowance per domain is 60 checks per hour. This can allow one account, for example: [email protected] to check every 1 minute. If you have two accounts: [email protected] and [email protected], the checks can be spread out between those accounts equally at 2 minute intervals. If you have more than two accounts, you can increase the intervals as needed. Please also remember that you can use email address forwarders; they can be extremely useful for you if you need to have multiple email addresses in use.

While we would like to let everyone poll the server as many times as they want, and for as many accounts that they have, we have to impose limits on our servers. We have to be realistic since the performance of the server is very important. It would be easier to have policies than to be on a server that is timing out on web requests, or having trouble queueing mail at all due to load spikes.

As covered earlier, we understand that in some cases you will have numerous people checking [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected]. If you have many mail accounts under one domain, the policy will still have to apply as is. We cannot permit many accounts checking every minute, especially under ownership of one account, when there are ways to alleviate the effects. We will review this policy and increase the limit if server load appears not be being affected.

If you have popped your mail more than the amount of times allowed, your password will be rejected and you will see a message such as this:

There was a problem logging onto your mail server. Your Password was rejected. Protocol: POP3, Server Response: ‘-ERR You have exceeded the number of connections you are permitted to make per hour. Please wait a couple of minutes and try again.’

If this occurs, you can check your webmail at: http://www.domain.com/webmail

So with that said, there will never be a point where you cannot access your email. There is always another route. In a shared environment, limits do need to be placed, there is no doubt about it. Problems occur if there are no limits at all. The reliability of a shared server relies on the success of proper planning and management.

It is important to note that at times a server’s limits will be changed from what they were set to previously. Accounts on an individual server have different (and sometimes unpredictable) needs and perform varying activities. We can state that the limits will remain at X and Y, but if a server is showing signs of trouble, we will need to cut additional corners on what processes are using the most CPU time. On the flip side, if we see a server is performing perfectly as is for months, we can then expand the limits gradually until a new comfortable but safe zone is reached. However, this mantra can be applied to many aspects of server use policies, not just mail.

Opt-in Email Marketing

If you choose to engage in marketing your site and/or services via email please heed the following. The only permitted form of email marketing is that in which the list is “opt-in”. By definition, opt-in is where people provide you with their email address specifically requesting to be on your email list for information about your site and/or service. Even opt-in has its share of issues, so we cannot guarantee we will host this type of site on our network. If we find your account transmitting email to persons that did not authorise such activity, that is grounds to suspend and terminate your site.

Note: On the flip side, the joining of an opt-in email list does not guarantee the legitimacy of such a list. Please contact us before joining any such list so that you will not be a victim of spam from second and third parties of such lists. We would be happy to help you determine if a list looks legitimate.

UCE, UBE, Spam

BWF Hosting Ltd has a zero tolerance policy regarding unsolicited commercial email (UCE) and unsolicited bulk email (UBE) also known as “spam”. The definition of spam:

An electronic message is “spam” IF: (1) the recipient’s personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (2) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent; AND (3) the transmission and reception of the message appears to the recipient to give a disproportionate benefit to the sender.

You will be cited with “UCE/UBE Abuse” if you send any email to persons who have not specifically asked to receive email from you. The sending origin of such email is irrelevant. Upon confirmation of abuse, any BWF Hosting Ltd customer engaging in this practice will have their service suspended. Not only does spam place a strain on the server that can negatively effect that server’s uptime record and performance record, you subject that server to the possibility of being blacklisted. Getting a server IP taken off a blacklist is a very time consuming process and while the process happens many customers are affected as mail bounces. We must all work together on a shared server to ensure blacklisting does not happen.

If your site will be sending mailings out to subscribers, this is a checklist of what you are required to do:

You must not try to hide, forge or misrepresent the sender of the e-mail and sending site of the e-mail.

Bulk mailings must specifically state how the persons’ e-mail addresses were obtained and must indicate the frequency of the mailing.

Bulk mailings should contain simple and obvious unsubscribe mechanisms. We recommend that this be in the form of a working link to a one-click unsubscribe system; however, a valid “reply to:” address may be used instead.

All subscription based e-mail must have valid, non-electronic, contact information for the sending organisation in the text of each e-mail including either a phone number or physical mailing address.

All bulk e-mail must be solicited, meaning that the sender has an existing and provable relationship with the e-mail recipient and the recipient has not requested not to receive future mailings from the sender. Documentation of the relationship between the sender and the recipient must be made available upon request.

Prohibited Uses of BWF Hosting Ltd Systems and Services Regarding Spam

Sending Unsolicited Bulk Email (“UBE”, “spam”). The sending of any form of Unsolicited Bulk Email through BWF Hosting Ltd servers is prohibited. Likewise, the sending of UBE from another service provider advertising a web site, email address or utilizing any resource hosted on BWF Hosting Ltd servers, is prohibited. BWF Hosting Ltd accounts or services may not be used to solicit customers from, or collect replies to, messages sent from another Internet Service Provider where those messages violate this Policy or that of the other provider.

Running Unconfirmed Mailing Lists. Subscribing email addresses to any mailing list without the express and verifiable permission of the email address owner is prohibited. All mailing lists run by BWF Hosting Ltd customers must be Closed-loop (“Confirmed Opt-in”). The subscription confirmation message received from each address owner must be kept on file for the duration of the existence of the mailing list. Purchasing lists of email addresses from 3rd parties for mailing to from any BWF Hosting Ltd hosted domain, or referencing any BWF Hosting Ltd account, is prohibited.

Operating an account on behalf of, or in connection with, or reselling any service to, persons or firms listed in the Spamhaus Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database at www.spamhaus.org.

We receive automatic reports from Spamhaus, AOL and SpamCop for our IP ranges. If there are more than three complaints logged against your site in one day, the site will be suspended until a resolution/explanation is made.

Information about our Email Service (provided as a courtesy with all web hosting accounts)

We are pleased to be able to provide a basic email service with all web hosting accounts for no additional charge. This email service is basic in nature and uses IMAP, SMTP and POP3 standard mail protocols meaning you can use it to confgure emails on software such as: Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook and Webmail.

The service is deemed as basic in nature as it does not come with any additional business features that are available as standard with the likes of paid services such as Google Workspace (formerly called GSuite) or Microsoft 365 including cloud storage space, office applications, shared calendars, shared documents etc.

We permit all users to set up multiple email addresses per domain for no additional charge on the understanding it is not a business grade service and we only promise best effort support. We strongly recommend if you need a Business Grade email solution that you consider paying for the likes of Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. These products are designed with the business user in mind and are what we always recommend for those users who need a business grade email service. If you use our complimentary email service you do so on the understanding it is offered on a best effort basis and is not a business grade service.

With every hosting account we provide one complimentary Spam Experts License to help with Spam Filtering via their incoming Anti Spam Cloud and also with Email Deliverability via their outgoing anti spam cloud. Using Spam Experts in most cases will help with most email deliverability issues and we recommend you ask us to enable the service for your hosting account. If you have more than one domain needing a Spam Experts License we can provide additional licenses for a small fee. Multi Site Accounts and Managed Servers come with more than 1 included license and the number of included licenses is dependant on the value of the service you have with us. Our support team can advise on request.

Clients should note that we are a Cloud Infrastructure Provider and we are not an IT Support Company. Our support is limited to providing you with the IMAP. POP3 and SMTP Settings and providing basic configuration assistance. We can use remote connection software to connect to your computer to help you set up emails on request for a small charge to cover staff time. We will of course always do our best to support clients as best we can by providing step by step instructions on request or screen shots of settings but if you do not have the technical knowhow to set up your emails we recommend you speak to an IT Support Company or a friend or relative who can assist you.

If any client does have a need for Google Workspace we recommend you buy this direct from Google as it is generally always cheaper there. Our friendly support team can help you with the DNS settings to get this working. If you need a managed Email Service with the Microsoft Suite of Products we do refer clients to a local company who provide this service for a very competitive fee – in case you were curious we do not take any commission on these referrals as the profit margins are small but the client we will refer you to have been a client of BWF for over ten years. Contact our support team if you want to be referred to the company we recommend for Microsoft business email products.

Direct End User Support for VPS and Reseller Clients

Support SLA and Fair Use Policy

This document will describe the level of support we will provide to clients of our Reseller, VPS or Dedicated Servers who purchase the direct end user support option.

Our client agrees to the following procedures to sign up for and use this service:

  • Our client contacts our sales team and chooses a plan
  • Our client gives us the list of domains we should provide support to directly
  • Our client gives us the domain name, name and email address of the clients they wish us to support directly
  • We set up ‘support only’ client areas for these people
  • Your clients can then open tickets on our helpdesk to get support
  • Support will only be provided by the helpdesk to such clients by our Level 3 Support Team.

Any client requesting support who we do not have pre-approval for from our client will be refused support for security reasons.

Support is provided on a best effort basis with the same priority as tickets from our shared hosting clients are handled. We aim to achieve the following SLA for the provision of support to such clients but in reality support is generally a lot faster on average:

Initial response to ticket within 60 minutes
Resolution of the problem within 6 hours
Tickets with the same priority will be handled in the order in which they were received.

A fair use policy applies to this service. We will always try to be as flexible as possible but where one client is taking an excessive amount of our time, management reserves the right to withdraw this service from that client and the client buys the service on this clear understanding. We believe 20 minutes per month per domain of technician time is at the upper end of the scale for what is considered fair use for the price paid. This will be more than sufficient for the vast majority of our clients. We will only enforce this policy if the user consistently exceeds the limit for more than 1 month as we do understand support needs vary from time to time.

We keep the fair use policy available to us for heavy users of direct support so that we don’t have to penalise everyone else by increasing our prices to cover the very significant cost of providing these support services. We thank you for your understanding.

Complaints

Any client who has a complaint about any aspect of our service whether that be hosting or domain name related is encouraged to ask for their support ticket to be escalated to our Support Manager for a fast response time. If you wish to start a complaint you can email [email protected] and a helpdesk ticket will be opened and the team will escalate it to the relevant queue. A manager will reach out to you within 24 hours during normal business hours and we always aim for complete satisfaction.