Terms of use

Silver Spruce Hosting will never require clients to advertise for Silver Spruce Hosting on their websites in any way, shape or form. Clients are allowed to use their sites for business/commercial or personal websites and content.

This document outlines the Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy between:

1 . Silver Spruce Hosting

and

2. You (the customer), with the details/data provided on the order/registration page

Content

All services provided by Silver Spruce Hosting may be used for lawful purposes only. Transmission, storage, or presentation of any information, data, or material in violation of any United States Federal, State, or City law is prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to: copyrighted material, material that is threatening or obscene, “adult only” content material, or material, protected by trade secrets and other statute.

Note: Pornography and sex-related merchandising are prohibited. This includes sexual content or direct links to adult content hosted elsewhere. Sites promoting any illegal activity, violence, or content that may be damaging to our servers or any other server, or links to such sites are also prohibited. Examples of non-acceptable content or links are:

Silver Spruce Hosting will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of this provision.

Disk Space

Silver Spruce Hosting will monitor the customer’s disk usage and if it exceeds the usage agreed upon, Silver Spruce Hosting shall have the right to take corrective actions. Such corrective actions may include assessment of additional charges or suspension of service.

File Sharing Services

Anonymous file sharing services are not allowed on any of our servers.

File sharing services are allowed on VPS servers, as long as they do not support anonymous uploads. For shared servers, file sharing services are allowed for personal and business use only. Silver Spruce Hosting reserves its right to revise the operation of each file sharing service run on a shared hosting account, and refuse service for it, if deemed necessary.

New orders and delivery policy

When a client orders and pays for a hosting service, Silver Spruce Hosting will process the order and send the necessary service management details via email to the provided client contact address(es) within one hour of receiving a payment confirmation from the payment processor.

When a client orders and pays for a domain registration, Silver Spruce Hosting will process the order and send the domain registration request to the domain registrar within one hour of receiving a payment confirmation from the payment processor. Silver Spruce Hosting will send the necessary service management details via email to the provided client contact address(es) within that time frame. The time it takes the domain registrar to process and complete the domain registration request is beyond Silver Spruce Hosting’s control and depends solely on the registrar.

Silver Spruce Hosting will not be held responsible for any delay or failure to provide a service due to problems affecting any network/system/application beyond Silver Spruce Hosting’s control. Problems that may result in a delayed or failed service delivery include but are not limited to:

   – delayed or missing payment confirmations due to issues at the payment processor and their systems;
   – delayed or failed domain registrations due to issues at the domain registrar and their systems;
   – any delays or system communication failures caused by issues at Internet/DNS/network providers.

Silver Spruce Hosting will not be held responsible for any undelivered, filtered, or lost service-related emails due to:

   – restrictive filtering rules at the receiving server/mailbox;
   – mis-configured third-party mail servers;
   – network issues affecting the mail communication;
   – inadvertent loss/deletion of emails by the client.

Silver Spruce Hosting Account Panel

By placing an order through the website (“www.SilverSpruceHosting.ca”), a customer account will be created for the client, giving access to a service management interface – “Silver Spruce Hosting Account Panel”, which allows management and control of services purchased from Silver Spruce Hosting.

Refund Policy

For shared hosting services with annual billing, Silver Spruce Hosting offers an unconditional 100-day money-back guarantee. If the customer wishes to cancel a hosting account on a shared server within the initial 100-day period for any reason, he/she/they has to notify Silver Spruce Hosting by e-mail at info@SilverSpruceHosting.ca, and the payment will be refunded. Since all domain registrations are irreversible and non-refundable, they will be subject to an annual registration fee for a separate/standalone domain, according to the Domain pricing list. Therefore, if the customer purchased a hosting account with a domain registration, the domain registration fee will be deducted from the refund amount. As the customer is the sole owner of the registered domain name, arrangements can be made to transfer its registration to another provider.

For hosting services with monthly billing, Silver Spruce Hosting offers a 15-day money-back guarantee, for the initial term of service only.

No partial or prorated refunds are offered after the initial money-back guarantee period.

If a customer disputes a setup / renewal charge for any account, Silver Spruce Hosting will not re-activate the service, unless the customer covers all fees involved, including the chargeback fee and any other transaction fees.

Accounts terminated due to policy violations will not be refunded.

The purpose of the money-back guarantee is to allow customers enough time to test Silver Spruce Hosting hosting services, and/or to be able to reverse possible erroneous payments. Silver Spruce Hosting reserves the right to refuse cancellation requests, in cases of a repeating abuse of the money-back guarantee policy – e.g. opening and refunding an account and then opening it again, or making too many cancellation requests for the mere purpose of using a free hosting service.

Account Renewal Policy

Silver Spruce Hosting does not renew accounts automatically. For the customer’s convenience, Silver Spruce Hosting will send renewal reminders to the contact email address on file for the corresponding hosting account. The customer is ultimately responsible for renewing the hosting account through one of the options given by Silver Spruce Hosting.

The schedule of these reminders and the events related to the expiration of various services are described on the Hosting Services Expiration and Renewal page.

Customers are not allowed to open a second hosting account for a domain that is already hosted through Silver Spruce Hosting. If the customer wants to continue hosting the specified domain with Silver Spruce Hosting, he/she needs to renew the account using one of the renewal options given by Silver Spruce Hosting.

Domain registration policy

The pricing of the domain registration services with Silver Spruce Hosting are defined in the Domain pricing list..

If you register domain(s) with Silver Spruce Hosting, or transfer an existing domain registration, you must be acquainted with the Registration Agreement of Enom Inc.: http://www.enom.com/terms/agreement.asp
By registering/transferring a domain at Silver Spruce Hosting, you confirm that you have read and you agree with the Registration Agreement of Enom Inc.

Registrant Verification

Per ICANN regulations, the registrant contact details of domain names may require verification. If the contacts were not previously verified for a domain name, a verification message will be sent to the registrant email address(es). The owner will need to follow a verification link within 15 days to avoid disruption of the domain service.

Dispute resolution policy

In case of ownership dispute, Silver Spruce Hosting reserves the right to be the sole decision maker in settling the dispute. There are several guidelines, based on which Silver Spruce Hosting will decide who is the rightful owner of the disputed hosting account or domain name:

Lost login information policy

In case the customer has lost the hosting account or domain name login information, he/she/they can request it to be sent to the contact e-mail address for the respective service.

If the contact e-mail address is outdated or incorrect, the customer should contact info@SilverSpruceHosting.ca to request an investigation of the issue. In this case, the dispute resolution policy may be applied.

Traffic guidelines

Accounts that reach their monthly traffic limit may be a subject of automatic site suspension. Also, any accumulated traffic over the monthly limit will be charged additionally in accordance with the characteristics of the plan purchased. If a site is suspended under this provision, and the hosting account is in good standing, the site will be enabled on the first date of the next month, when the traffic counter is reset. In case of failure to cover fees incurred by traffic over-usage, Silver Spruce Hosting reserves the right to take corrective actions such as full suspension of the hosting account. In case Silver Spruce Hosting takes corrective actions under this provision, the customer shall not be entitled to a refund of any fees paid in advance.

Chat Rooms

Running and linking to IRC servers or IRC bots and clients such as Eggdrop, BitchX, ircii, etc., is strictly prohibited.

Background running programs

Programs running in the background are not allowed on shared hosting servers.

Resource usage

To maintain the integrity of our shared hosting services, we have several special per-user resource limits in place. These include, but are not limited to:

Silver Spruce Hosting reserves the right to alter the above limitations and to place additional limits without prior notice if an account endangers the stability or the performance of the hosting server due to intensive resource usage. The additional limits may include, but are not limited to MySQL, memory and CPU usage limitations, and stopping access to directories.

Multi-domain hosting

Each hosting account on Silver Spruce Hosting servers is meant to be used for one domain, or multiple domains according to the hosting plan. Parked domains are full aliases of the main domain – they display the same site content and share the same mailboxes. If the hosting package does not allow multi domain hosting, pointing parked domains to subfolders or subdomains on the account through .htaccess files or other means is not allowed.

Proxy, VPN software and redirection services

We do not allow running of proxy and VPN software on our servers. Sites offering shortening URL services are not allowed as well.

Distribution and/or transmission of obscene or indecent speech or materials

Violation of indecency and obscenity laws can result in criminal penalties.

Published content

The customer may not host material that is:

Note: Defamatory speech distributed over the Internet can result in civil liability for the defamer.

Account content ownership

The content of the hosting account is considered to be a property of the customer. The customer retains ownership on all data that he/she/they uploads to the hosting account. Silver Spruce Hosting will not use the data on the hosting account for any other purpose than for the provision of the hosting service itself. Silver Spruce Hosting will not provide hosting account data to any third parties, unless this is required by law, or the customer has agreed upon this.

As an owner of the hosting account data, the customer is solely responsible for the content of the account, including its security. Silver Spruce Hosting reserves its right to block access to any content that may be threatening the security of the hosting service, the data of other customers on the servers, or Silver Spruce Hosting’s reputation. Silver Spruce Hosting reserves its right to judge as to what content is considered threatening and is a subject of this rule.

Intellectual property rights

Materials, accessible to the customer through Silver Spruce Hosting’s services, may be subject to protection under the United States or other copyright laws, or laws protecting trademarks, trade secrets or proprietary information. Except when exclusively permitted by the owner of such rights, the customer may not use Silver Spruce Hosting’s services in a manner that would infringe, violate, dilute, or misappropriate any such rights, with respect to any material, which the customer accesses or receives through Silver Spruce Hosting’s network. If the customer uses a domain name in connection with Silver Spruce Hosting’s service, he/she/they may not use that domain name in violation of any third-party trademark, service mark, or similar rights.

When using Silver Spruce Hosting’s services, the customer retains all intellectual property rights on their own content, trademarks, and any other data related to the site/account content. Silver Spruce Hosting will use this content/data/trademarks only for the provision of the hosting service unless other actions are required by law.

Network security

Customers may not use Silver Spruce Hosting’s network in an attempt to circumvent user authentication or security of any host, network, or account. This includes but is not limited to: accessing data not intended for the customer, logging into a server or account the customer is not exclusively authorized to access, password cracking, probing the security of other networks in search of weaknesses, or violation of any other organization’s security policy. Customers may not attempt to interfere or deny service to any user, host or network. This includes, but is not limited to: flooding, mail bombing or other deliberate attempts to overload or crash a host or network. Silver Spruce Hosting will fully cooperate with investigations of violations of systems or network security. This also includes cooperating with law enforcement authorities in the investigation of suspected criminal violations. Users who violate system or network security may incur criminal or civil liability.

Spam or unsolicited e-mail

The customer may not use Silver Spruce Hosting’s network, Silver Spruce Hosting’s equipment, or Silver Spruce Hosting’s e-mail service in connection with the transmission of spam, flames, mail bombs, or similar unsolicited e-mail messages. The customer’s domain may not be referenced as originator, intermediary or reply-to address in any of the above. This prohibition fully extends to sending of unsolicited mailings from another service that in any way mentions your domain name or implicates the use of the Silver Spruce Hosting’s network, Silver Spruce Hosting’s equipment, or Silver Spruce Hosting’s e-mail services. A message is considered unsolicited if it is posted in violation of a newsgroup charter, or if it is sent to a recipient without his/her/their prior consent. For purposes of this provision, merely making one’s e-mail address accessible to the public will not constitute a request or invitation to receive messages.

In case sufficient evidence is presented about any violation of this provision, Silver Spruce Hosting reserves the right to disable the customer’s account without prior notice. For the purpose of acquiring such evidence, Silver Spruce Hosting will use various techniques, including but not limited to: closely inspecting all spam reports, searching the logs of Silver Spruce Hosting’s mail servers, and scanning the server space for popular “spamming” applications. Silver Spruce Hosting will be the sole arbiter as to what would be considered sufficient evidence.

Abuse

Any attempts to undermine, slander, libel, threaten or cause harm to Silver Spruce Hosting’s customers, employees and property, or to the company directly, is grounds for immediate termination without refund. In addition, any such attempts will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Abuse of promotion rules

Silver Spruce Hosting may conduct promotions on certain type of services – new purchases, upgrades, renewals, transfers. Attempts to use promotions or promotional codes for a type of service other than the one the promotion is specified for, is considered an attempt to abuse the rules of the promotion, and this is grounds for termination of all hosting accounts related to the abused service.

Indemnification

Customer agrees to indemnify, defend and hold harmless, Silver Spruce Hosting, its subsidiaries and other affiliated companies, its officers, directors, employees and agents from and against all losses, expenses, damages and costs, including reasonable attorneys’ fees, resulting from any violation of these Terms of Use.

Refusal of service

Silver Spruce Hosting reserves the right to refuse hosting for insecure applications that could be, for instance, utilized by an attacker to gain unauthorized access to the server and/or execute applications with the privileges of the customer that has uploaded the insecure application in question. Customers are responsible for keeping their applications up-to-date, checking for security issues with the application vendor, and updating to the latest secure version that is available. In the event that an insecure application is installed on the hosting account of the customer, Silver Spruce Hosting reserves the right to disable access to it, or, if deemed necessary, to the hosting account in its entirety. This will be with the exclusive purpose of preventing damage to the customer and to the other customers hosted on the same server, and may be done with or (in case of emergency) without prior notice.

Silver Spruce Hosting reserves the right to impose restrictions or fully suspend any of the services provided to customers, in case the operation of these services threatens the overall security and stability of the hosting system, and/or the proper operation of other customers’ accounts/services.

Silver Spruce Hosting reserves the right at its sole discretion to refuse or cancel service. Violation of any of Silver Spruce Hosting’s Terms could result in a warning, suspension, or account termination. Submitting fake personal information can also be grounds for suspension or termination.

WHOIS privacy terms

The domain WHOIS privacy feature replaces the data in the WHOIS output of your domain with details of SureSupport.com. You are still the owner of the domain name, and you can turn off the WHOIS privacy feature at any time.

Raw access logs retention policy

Raw access logs of the web server and the FTP server may count or not count towards the disk space of the hosting user, depending on the type of hosting service (shared/VPS).

In case the raw access logs are not counted towards the disk space of the hosting user, the logs will be kept on the server for two years. HTTP and FTP log files older than two years will be automatically removed from the server.

Hosting service for educational institutions

Hosting plans with the name “Educational Institutions” are provided to educational institutions only. Examples of educational institutions are: primary, intermediate, or high schools, colleges, universities, which provide formal education, as well as their functional equivalents in various countries. The user/owner of the provided hosting service is the legal entity that manages the respective educational institution, and not an employee, educator, or student that is a part of the educational institution. The site/services on the account are meant to be used for the official purposes of the respective educational institution – e.g. their official website.

Silver Spruce Hosting keeps the right to decide at its own discretion whether a user that applies for an educational hosting service is an educational institution or not, as well as whether the account is used for official purposes of the educational institution.

Site Migration terms

Site Migration is a service provided by Silver Spruce Hosting to its customers and represents a physical moving of site data from a previous hosting provider and initial site configuration on Silver Spruce Hosting servers. The Site Migration service is available one time, during the first 100 days of a new subscription contract. The service includes the moving and configuration of one or more websites (depending on the hosting plan), with the associated site database(s).

The customer must request the service through a support ticket through the hosting control panel. Prior to initiating the migration, Silver Spruce Hosting may request from the customer additional information, that may include information about the site and login credentials. To be able to use the service, the customer must provide one of the following:

In case the data is on a remote server, but it is damaged, not accessible, or not usable for any other reason, Silver Spruce Hosting will not initiate communication with the party managing this remote server. Instead, Silver Spruce Hosting will contact the customer with the status of their site migration, and the actions that the customer must take.

The Site Migration service does not guarantee the operation of the site on Silver Spruce Hosting servers. The site files and database will be transferred as they are, and Silver Spruce Hosting representatives will attempt to configure the site to work on Silver Spruce Hosting servers. The site must be compatible with the technologies offered on Silver Spruce Hosting servers, should be secure as per section “Refusal of service” of these Terms, and should not be limited to a certain hosting service.

Silver Spruce Hosting cannot guarantee a successful migration. Differences in server technologies, legal matters, or other impediments may prevent Silver Spruce Hosting from starting, or completing the site migration service.

Email migration and domain configuration are not considered a part of the Site Migration service. Email migration is possible under certain circumstances, given that email data is provided in a specific format (cPanel, Maildir). Domain configuration/repointing might be possible only if the domain name is registered by Silver Spruce Hosting.

Silver Spruce Hosting does not bear any liability for the downtime of the site during the site migration or for losses incurred by non-operation of the site during and after the migration.

Advanced Security

Advanced Security is a complex service that includes several other services which may include daily malware scanning, malware removal and cleanup, blacklist removal, security auditing, investigation, and reporting, as well as regular file change monitoring, protection from common attack vectors and known security exploits, quarantined backups, and other relevant services.

 

The Advanced Security service is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind. In particular, we cannot guarantee that the service will prevent initial or subsequent malware infection of the covered site. We will make reasonable efforts to perform these services for a covered website and restore it to a working state on a best-effort basis. If we are unable, for any reason, to clean up the site from malware, we will refund any fees paid for the service.

A customer may request that we clean up their site from malware as many times as needed, as long as all security recommendations presented by our team after a cleanup are followed.

The service is applicable to one website, where a website is defined as a single software application with a single database, or a software application with a single administration interface, running in one hosting account.

Our 100-day money-back guarantee applies to the Advanced Security service, as long as one of the following conditions are met:

Extended Backups

Extended Backups is a paid service upgrade which provides 12 months of extra backups for a hosting account. Extended backups start accumulating after the customer purchases the upgrade. With the Extended Backups service, all account data gets backed up on the 1st and 15th day of each month, and each backup is kept for 12 months on a separate server.

The Extended Backups service is covered by the Silver Spruce Hosting unconditional 100-day money-back guarantee. If the customer wants to cancel this service within the 100-day period, they need to notify Silver Spruce Hosting by e-mail at info@SilverSpruceHosting.ca or via а ticket posted through the Silver Spruce Hosting Account Panel.

Disclaimer: Silver Spruce Hosting cannot guarantee the integrity of the backups and the data they contain. Reasons for inconsistent/broken backups include but are not limited to: incorrectly stored/broken user files, accounts near or exceeding their disk space and/or inodes quota, accounts that affect the stability of the backup system, system failures, force majeure.

Scheduled Server Maintenance Policy

Our major server maintenance events are announced on our Maintenance Schedule page within a reasonable time frame. Our maintenance windows are as follows:

Outages within the weekday maintenance periods are not expected to exceed 15 minutes. If they do, this will be reflected in the uptime statistics.

Major maintenance events that affect all servers are scheduled for the weekend unless they are urgent, and their deferral may compromise the security or stability of the hosting servers.

Urgent maintenance events may occur at any time. Outages due to maintenance events conducted outside the maintenance windows listed above will be reflected in the uptime statistics.

Governing Law and Jurisdiction

For services with specific location (eg. hosting), the legislation of the country which the service is provided in would be supplemental to the governing law. With regard to possible conflicts of laws or principles, any such conflicts are to be decided according to the primary governing law.

Disclaimer

Silver Spruce Hosting, at its sole discretion, may change these terms and conditions at any time. By using Silver Spruce Hosting’s services, the user agrees that Silver Spruce Hosting may: (1) revise these terms and conditions; and (2) change the services provided. Any such revision or change will be binding and effective immediately on posting of the revised terms or change to the service(s) on Silver Spruce Hosting’s web site, or on notification to the customer by e-mail. The customer agrees to periodically review Silver Spruce Hosting’s web site, including these terms, to get informed of any such revisions. If the customer does not agree with any revision, he/she may terminate the services at any time by notifying Silver Spruce Hosting by e-mail or via a ticket posted through the (Silver Spruce Hosting Account Panel). Notice of the customer’s termination will be effective on receipt and processing by Silver Spruce Hosting. The customer agrees that, by continuing to use Silver Spruce Hosting’s services following notice of any revision to this Agreement or change in service(s), he/she abides by any such revisions or changes.

The content available through this site is the sole property of Silver Spruce Hosting and is protected by patent, copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. Except as otherwise explicitly agreed in writing, Silver Spruce Hosting-owned content received through this site may be downloaded, displayed, reformatted, and printed for your personal, non-commercial use only. You agree not to reproduce, retransmit, distribute, disseminate, sell, publish, broadcast, or circulate the content received through this site to anyone, including but not limited to others in the same company or organization without Silver Spruce Hosting’s express prior written consent.

Limited Liability

THE CUSTOMER AGREES THAT SILVER SPRUCE HOSTING SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY (1) SUSPENSION OR LOSS OF THE SERVICE(S), INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATION SERVICES AND WEB HOSTING SERVICES, (2) USE OF THE SERVICE(S), INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATION SERVICES AND WEB HOSTING SERVICES, (3) INTERRUPTION OF SILVER SPRUCE HOSTING’S SERVICES OR INTERRUPTION OF THE CUSTOMER’S BUSINESS, (4) ACCESS DELAYS OR ACCESS INTERRUPTIONS TO SILVER SPRUCE HOSTING’S WEB SITE(S) OR SERVICE(S) OR DELAYS OR ACCESS INTERRUPTIONS THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES IN RELATION TO THE SERVICES OFFERED BY SILVER SPRUCE HOSTING; (5) LOSS OR LIABILITY RESULTING FROM ACTS OF OR EVENTS BEYOND SILVER SPRUCE HOSTING’S CONTROL (6) DATA NON-DELIVERY, MIS-DELIVERY, CORRUPTION, DESTRUCTION OR OTHER MODIFICATION; (7) LOSS OR LIABILITY RESULTING FROM THE UNAUTHORIZED USE OR MISUSE OF THE CUSTOMER’S ACCOUNT; OR (8) APPLICATION OF THE DISPUTE POLICIES. SILVER SPRUCE HOSTING ALSO WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OF ANY KIND (INCLUDING LOST PROFITS) REGARDLESS OF THE FORM OF ACTION WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF SILVER SPRUCE HOSTING HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. IN NO EVENT SHALL SILVER SPRUCE HOSTING’S MAXIMUM AGGREGATE LIABILITY EXCEED THE TOTAL AMOUNT PAID BY THE CUSTOMER FOR THE DISPUTED SERVICE, BUT IN NO EVENT GREATER THAN ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS ($100.00). BECAUSE SOME STATES DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF LIABILITY FOR CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, IN SUCH STATES, SILVER SPRUCE HOSTING’S LIABILITY SHALL BE LIMITED TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.