Fluid Hosting Acceptable Use Policy

1. Purpose

The purpose of this policy is to outline the acceptable use of web hosting, dedicated server, colocation service and network connectivity at Fluid Hosting. These rules are in place to protect Fluid Hosting and its customers. Inappropriate use exposes Fluid Hosting to risks including virus attacks, compromise of network systems and services, and legal issues.

2. Unacceptable Use

The following activities are, in general, prohibited. Under no circumstances is the customer authorized to engage in any activity that is illegal under local, state, federal or international law while utilizing Fluid Hosting-owned resources, including but not limited to Fluid Hosting's servers, customer's colocated servers while residing on Fluid Hosting's facility and Fluid Hosting's network.

Fluid Hosting will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes as unacceptable use. If in doubt, please contact Fluid Hosting before proceeding.

The lists below are by no means exhaustive, but attempt to provide a framework for activities which fall into the category of unacceptable use

The following activities are strictly prohibited, with no exceptions:

Copyrighted Materials and Content

1. Violations of the rights of any person or company protected by copyright, trade secret, patent or other intellectual property, or similar laws or regulations, including, but not limited to, the installation or distribution of "pirated" or other software products that are not appropriately licensed for use by the customer.
2. Unauthorized copying of copyrighted material including, but not limited to, digitization and distribution of photographs from magazines, books or other copyrighted sources, copyrighted music, and the installation of any copyrighted software for which the customer or the end user does not have an active license is strictly prohibited.
3. Exporting software, technical information, encryption software or technology, in violation of international or regional export control laws, is illegal.
4. Storing or distributing adult-related material.

System and Network Activities

5. Introduction of malicious programs into the network or server (e.g., viruses, worms, Trojan horses, e-mail bombs, etc.).
6. Revealing your account password to others or allowing use of your account by others that are not a direct member of your company. This includes family and other household members when work is being done at home.
7. Using a Fluid Hosting computing asset to actively engage in procuring or transmitting material that is in violation of sexual harassment or hostile workplace laws in the user's local jurisdiction.
8. Making fraudulent offers of products, items, or services originating from any Fluid Hosting's server or network.
9. Effecting security breaches or disruptions of network communication. Security breaches include, but are not limited to, accessing data of which the customer is not an intended recipient or logging into a server or account that the customer is not expressly authorized to access. For purposes of this section, "disruption" includes, but is not limited to, network sniffing, pinged floods, packet spoofing, denial of service, and forged routing information for malicious purposes.
10. Port scanning or security scanning is expressly prohibited unless prior notification to Fluid Hosting is made.
11. Executing any form of network monitoring which will intercept data not intended for the customer's account/host.
12. Circumventing user authentication or security of any host, network or account.
13. Interfering with or denying service to any user other than the customer's account/host (for example, denial of service attack).
14. Using any program/script/command, or sending messages of any kind, with the intent to interfere with, or disable, a user's terminal session, via any means, locally or via the Internet.
15. Running any IRC related scripts or programs, including but not limited to eggdrop, bnc, ircdaemon and irc bot.
16. Running any process / daemon / service in the background on Fluid Hosting's shared server without prior Fluid Hosting's approval.
17. On Fluid Hosting's shared server, running CGI or server-side scripts or programs, intentionally or otherwise using excessive amount of system resources or causing degradation of server performance. Any such process will be terminated without prior warning or notice. Fluid Hosting will be the sole arbiter of what constitutes excessive use of system resources and degraded server performance.
18. Accessing system files or files that do not belong to the customer.

Email and Communications Activities

19. Sending unsolicited email messages, including the sending of "junk mail" or other advertising material to individuals who did not specifically request such material (email spam).
20. Any form of harassment via email, telephone or paging, whether through language, frequency, or size of messages.
21. Unauthorized use, or forging, of email header information.
22. Solicitation of email for any other email address, other than that of the poster's account, with the intent to harass or to collect replies.
23. Creating or forwarding "chain letters", "Ponzi" or other "pyramid" schemes of any type.
24. Use of unsolicited email originating from within Fluid Hosting's networks or other Internet service providers on behalf of, or to advertise, any service hosted by Fluid Hosting or connected via Fluid Hosting's network.
25. Posting the same or similar non-business-related messages to large numbers of Usenet newsgroups (newsgroup spam).

3. Enforcement

Fluid Hosting reserves the right to suspend or terminate without warning or notice, the account and services to any customer found to have violated this policy. Furthermore, the customer may be liable for a penalty of $500 minimum.

4. Definitions

Term Definition
Spam Unauthorized and/or unsolicited electronic mass mailings.

5. Revisions

AUP::rev 2.0, February 12th, 2002