Master Service Agreement
The following Master Service Agreement, hereinafter referred to as the "MSA" or "agreement," is made between Fluid Hosting LLC, a company registered in the state of Pennsylvania, US, hereinafter referred to as "Fluid Hosting," and you (also referred to as "Customer") and shall be effective immediately upon service activation. As used in this agreement, "you" and "your" refer to you, the Customer, and "we," "our," and "us" refer to Fluid Hosting. Both parties shall be referred collectively as the "parties." By continuing with this account sign up, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agreed to this Agreement.
Services
Fluid Hosting is a web hosting company that provides wide varieties of services such as, but not limited to, Cloud Shared Hosting, Cloud Private Hosting, Cloud Reseller Hosting, Managed WordPress Hosting, Cloud Virtual Private Server, Dedicated Server, Collocation, Backup Service, Domain Registration, SSL Certificate, server administration, and other consultation services. New customer sign-up will be manually verified, processed, and activated during our normal business hours only (Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM US Eastern Time). We reserve the right to deny service to any customer for any reason.
Account Ownership
We make distinction between Main (Administrative) Contact Info, Technical Info, and Billing Info. We consider the person listed under Main Contact Info as the account owner (you). Specifically, this agreement is entirely binding between us and you. For this reason, all signups must be done by you or, with your explicit permission, on your behalf. We consider whoever having access to the account control panel as the account owner. Thus, please make sure that you keep your control panel access information secure.
Service Contract, Payments, Renewal, and Voluntary Service Termination
Our services come with monthly, annual, and longer billing terms with payment for the whole billing term is expected in advance. Your service will be activated after payment is received. The day your service is activated marks the start of your billing period and this agreement becomes binding throughout the billing period. To ensure continuous service, your service will be automatically renewed at the end of the billing period (the service renewal date) for the same billing term. Thus, if you have a service with an annual billing term, your service will be renewed for another annual term at the end of the year of service. For your convenience, a renewal invoice will be generated 7 days prior to the end of your billing period and renewal payments are expected by the service renewal date. The following payment methods are accepted: (1) credit cards (AMEX, DISCOVER, MASTERCARD, VIS), (2) PayPal, (3) e-Check, and (4) wire transfer (with $10 and $25 wire transfer fee for US domestic and International wire transfer, respectively). When credit card is selected as your payment method, you give us permission to charge the credit card you have filed on our system for all invoices in your account.
To cancel this automatic renewal, written cancellation request must be submitted by opening a ticket from your account control panel 14 days or 30 days prior to the end of the billing period for services with monthly and longer billing terms, respectively. Assuming your account is in good standing, we will terminate your service at the end of your billing period. Until the account is properly terminate, you are still responsible for all hosting fees, including all over-usage charges and other fees incurred. You may, at your discretion, request to terminate this service prior to the end of your billing period. Assuming the account is in good standing, we will terminate your service on the date you specify. Please refer to section V for our refund policy in this case.
Once we process your service termination, our system will start to wipe out your data from our server and existing backup on our backup storage at which point your data and any backup of your data will no longer be available.
Service Suspension and Involuntary Service Termination
Renewal payment is expected on the service renewal date. A 14-day grace period windows is provided for you to make payment of all outstanding balance. Failure to pay for your service during this grace period will cause the system to suspend your service. If payment is not received after 45 days, your service will be terminated. Any payment received after the service renewal date is considered delinquent and is subject to a 0.04932% daily (1.5% monthly or 18% annual) interest. Such an interest will also be imposed on any delinquent balance caused by bounced check, dispute, and chargeback as well to any fees resulting from bounced checks, attorney fees, collection agency fees, et cetera.
In the event of chargeback or other dispute, we will suspend your service. This suspension will be in place until all chargeback or dispute has been cleared. There is an account re-activation fee of at least $10 and no more than $50 to re-activate each suspended service. Once the service is terminated, it can only be restored with a fee of at least $50 and no more than $250. We reserve the right not to reactivate or restore your service. Once your service is suspended or terminated we are under no obligation to release your data and any backup of your data, including, when applicable, your collocated equipment, until all overdue balance is paid. In addition, we are not responsible for your data and any backup of your data once your service has been suspended or terminated.
For violating our Acceptable Use Policy, hereinafter “AUP,” we reserve the right to void this agreement and may terminate your service anytime. No refund or service credit will be given for AUP violation. In addition, you agree that additional charges may be imposed for each AUP violation.
Without breaking our AUP, we reserve the right to discontinue your service and this agreement by giving you at least 30-day advance written notification. This service termination notification will be conveyed to your through our ticket system. In such rare event, we will provide you a prorated refund for the unused portion of your billing period you already paid or free you from the payment obligation for the remaining billing period.
Money Back and Refund Policy
We are proud to offer you up to 45-day unconditional money-back guarantee: 45 days for Cloud Shared Hosting, Cloud Private Hosting, Cloud Reseller Hosting, and Managed WordPress Hosting customers; 30 days for Cloud Virtual Private Server and Backup Service customers; 15 days for Dedicated Server customers. No explicit money-back guarantee is offered to other services not mentioned here. To be protected under our money back-guarantee, please purchase our services with monthly billing term initially. The money-back guarantee will be voided on a purchase with longer billing period or when you switch to a longer billing period during the money-back guarantee period.
We will terminate your service upon receiving your money-back request. You are entitled to 100% refund, less any non-refundable fees, during this money-back guarantee period. Our money back guarantee is voided in the event of AUP violation.
The following should be excluded from and are not refundable under this money back policy: (1) custom order; (2) setup fees; (3) consultation and system administration services already performed; (4) domain name registration, transfer, or renewal, even if you have mistakenly misspelled the domain name; (5) SSL certificate purchase; (6) SSH access fees; (7) backup restore fees; (8) over-usage charges.
Backup Service and Availability
Backup service is included for free for Cloud Shared Hosting, Cloud Private Hosting, Cloud Reseller Hosting, and Managed WordPress Hosting customers and is optional and can be purchased as an add-on service for Cloud Virtual Private Server and Dedicated Server customers. As part of our backup service, we will perform daily backup of your data (web files, database, emails, and logs) onto our dedicated backup and retain this backup for fourteen days. Backup restore will be made available at a price of $15 for each restore request. Cloud Virtual Private Server and Dedicated Server customers can purchase optional backup service. We also perform daily snapshot of the Cloud VPS image and keep it for fourteen days. Bare metal restore of customers' Cloud VPS can be performed at a fee of $25 for each restore request.
For our own fault/negligence, we will restore your file(s) free of charge when requested provided that such request is made within seven days after the negligence is done. After this seven-day period, we do not guarantee that the restore request can be fulfilled. In the rare event that we cannot restore your file(s) while it is clear that the restore is requested for our own fault/negligence, we agree to compensate you 100% of your monthly hosting fee. This compensation will be provided as a service credit and can only be given once in any one-month billing period.
Our backup should be considered as secondary to your own disaster recovery plan. We strongly advise you to maintain your own backup.
Acceptable Use Policy
To maintain the high-standard of service quality and to protect the interest of our customers at large, we have compiled a list of acceptable uses policy. Inappropriate activities expose each customer to unnecessary compromises and services degradation. We will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes as AUP violation. When in doubt, feel free to contact us for further clarification. You are not, under any circumstances, authorized to engage in any activity that is illegal under US local, state, and federal laws and international laws while utilizing our services and network. It is your responsibility to check with US local, state, and federal laws and international laws and to comply with these laws at all time.
For breaking our AUP, we reserve the right to suspend or terminate your service at any time without warning or notification. Furthermore, we may impose a penalty of $100 minimum and up to the maximum allowable under local/state law for each AUP violation.
The activities listed below, by no means exhaustive, is provided to give you an idea of activities which we consider unacceptable and, thus, are strictly prohibited, with no exceptions:
- Collecting, storing, using, installing, and distributing any copyrighted materials, trade secrets, patents, and other intellectual properties belonging to other persons or entities for which you have not received explicit permission to do so.
- Collecting, storing, using, installing, and distributing malicious programs.
- Storing or distributing adult-related materials.
- Exporting software, technical information, or technology in violation of international or regional export control laws.
- Sites that promote hate and intolerance against other people, group of people, and other religions.
- Facilitating or engaging in security breaches or disruptions of network communication. Security breaches include, but are not limited to, accessing data of which you are not an intended recipient or logging into a server or account that you are 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. Port scanning or security scanning is expressly prohibited unless you have obtained our written approval for such activity.
- Interfering with or denying service to any user other than your own account/host (for example, denial of service attack).
- Using any program/script/command or sending messages of any kind with the intent to interfere with or disable a user's terminal session by any mean, locally or through the Internet.
- Running any IRC related scripts or programs including, but not limited, to eggdrop, bnc, ircdaemon and irc bot without written approval from us.
- Running any process/daemon/service in the background on our shared servers.
- Utilizing excessive amount of server resources exceeding your fair use which leads to service performance degradation. On our shared server (Cloud Shared Hosting and Cloud Reseller Hosting) this means using more than 5% of total server resources (CPU, memory, storage, and disk I/O) and total server network traffic (bandwidth, total connections, et cetera) or other resources.
- Storing files/data unrelated to the website(s) you host on our network (for example, pictures that are not part of your web).
- Adding domains to your account that you neither own or authorize to manage.
- Using our shared server storage as backup storage.
- Using our backup server to store or backup data or files that are not hosted on our servers and network or not part of your service.
- Accessing system files or files that do not belong to you.
- Sending unsolicited email messages, including the sending of "junk mail" or other advertising material, to individuals who did not specifically request such material from you.
- Unauthorized use or forging of email header information.
- Creating or forwarding "chain letters," "Ponzi," or other "pyramid" schemes of any type.
- Use of unsolicited email originating from within our networks or other Internet service providers or posting messages to large numbers of Usenet newsgroup on behalf of, or to advertise, any service hosted by us or connected via our network.
- Running or operating anonymous public proxy servers/applications.
- Unprofessional, hostile, and abusive conducts towards our staff and other customers.
Service Level Agreement
An integral and essential part of delivering a high-quality service to you is by offering a strong Service Level Agreement, hereinafter “SLA.” We are proud to offer you a SLA of 99.9% uptime guarantee. This means you should not experience more than 44 minutes of unscheduled service interruption in any given month, counted from the first day of the month. This uptime guarantee excludes any scheduled emergency/non-emergency maintenance work that may, unfortunately, may cause service interruption until the maintenance work is done. In the rare event we fail to meet our SLA guarantee, you can request for a SLA compensation credit as described in this section.
You are entitled to a service credit of 1% of your monthly hosting fee of all service affected for every 22 minutes of downtime beyond our uptime guarantee of 99.9%. SLA credit is limited to 100% of your monthly hosting per every calendar month. You will need to request SLA credit within seven days after our SLA is broken and must provide proofs to such service interruption claim. Unfortunately, due to the possibility of network issues outside our network, third party monitoring may not constitute as proof of service interruption. All service credit claim must be requested by opening a ticket through your account control panel.
The following services availability is guaranteed:
- Cloud Shared Hosting, Cloud Private Hosting, Cloud Reseller, Managed WordPress: network connectivity, HTTP, FTP, Database, Mail (IMAP/IMAPS, POP3/POP3S, and SMTP/SMTPS), and DNS Services.
- Cloud Virtual Private Server: network connectivity and host node availability.
- Dedicated Server: network connectivity, power to your server(s), and all hardware/components in the server(s).
- Collocation customers: network connectivity and power to collocated servers or equipment.
- Backup Service: connectivity to the backup server.
The following is excluded from our SLA guarantee:
- Temporary or permanent blockage of ports due for security concerns.
- Service degradation resulting from DOS/DDOS attacks and service interruption as part of our attempt to mitigate these attacks including, but not limited to, removing the attacked IP(s) from our routes (IP blackhole/null), blocking certain ports, et cetera.
We do not explicitly guarantee the availability of any of our services other than the above-mentioned services.
We can only be responsible for the uptime of our own network connectivity. We shall not be held responsible for any connectivity problems caused in external networks and not within our control, such as issues with our network upstream, issues caused by congestion in some outside networks, et cetera. We define continuous packet losses originating inside our internal network of 5% for 30-minute duration as a loss of connectivity equal to 0.1% of downtime. We also define sporadic packet losses originating inside our internal network of 5% for 120-minute duration as loss of connectivity equal to 0.1% of downtime. You must provide us with proofs for any claim of loss of connectivity and/or other network issues.
Al non-emergency maintenance work will be scheduled two business days prior to the date and time the maintenance is to be performed. In the rare event that an emergency maintenance is deemed necessary to maintain the integrity of our services to you, we will perform the necessary maintenance with a short or, in some cases, without any advance notification. We shall send notification to you regarding this emergency maintenance work. All notifications regarding maintenance work will be sent to the email address listed in the main/administrator contact and/or technical contact listed in your account.
IP Assignments.
You agree and understand that all IP(s) is (are) assigned on a lease term basis and should be returned to us at the end of your service. We also reserve the right to reallocate/renumber your IP by giving you at least 7-day advance written communication. Furthermore, you agree to use our IPs as needed, following the guidelines set by the American Registry of Internet Numbers (AIRN). We reserve the right to audit your IP(s) usage at any time and may require you to provide technical justification for any assigned IP(s). We will give you a grace period of seven days to resolve any IP assignment dispute. If we do not receive any resolution to this dispute after the grace period has elapsed, we reserve the right to revoke and reassign your IP(s). Fluid Hosting will not be responsible for any service interruption resulting from this revocation or reassignment.
Unsolicited Emails/SPAM and DMCA complaints
We have the obligation to maintain the integrity of our network and services. Because of this, we do not take any unsolicited emails (hereinafter, SPAM) complaints lightly. Upon receiving a SPAM complaint against your website(s)/account, we shall notify you and will expect you to resolve the spam complaint within 24 hours. We reserve the right to suspend or even terminate your account and service without any advance notification if we receive multiple SPAM complaints that show a clear pattern of abuse. However, without notifying you, we also reserve the right to suspend and even terminate your service/account on the first complaint received, especially when it is clear that you have been deliberately abusing our service against our AUP. We will neither provide any data archival nor be held responsible for any data loss due to this account suspension or termination. Each SPAM email sent will be considered a single instance of AUP violation. In short, we define SPAM emails/activities as emails/activities which are sent or accomplished without the permission from the receiving individuals and which are originating from our network or from other networks/ISPs containing any reference to or to advertise any products/services hosted on our network. In the event that our IP space is blacklisted due to your activity, we may charge a clean-up fee of $20 for each blacklisted IP.
We take copyright infringement complaint very seriously. Upon receiving a written Digital Millennium Copyright Act, hereinafter “DMCA,” complaint and verifying that such complaint follows the proper format and procedure, we will take down the infringing materials and contact you. At which point, you may send us a counter notification in writing in accordance to sections 512(g)(2) and (3) of DMCA. Upon receiving your counter notification, we may reinstate the materials in question and contact the complainant.
Addendums
Addendums for Shared Hosting Customers
Cloud Shared Hosting, Cloud Private Hosting, Cloud Reseller Hosting, and Managed WordPress Hosting customers may request SSH access to our servers. We shall evaluate each SSH request we receive and may require you to provide reason/justification for your request as well as provide us with a copy of government-issued photo ID. A one-time non-refundable fee of $25 will be imposed on all approved SSH access request. We reserve the right to decline any request for any reason. Furthermore, we also reserve the right to revoke any SSH access previously given for any reason.
Addendums for Reseller Customer
We extend our service to qualified organization, hereinafter referred to as “Reseller,” to be our Technology Partner and give reseller the ability to resell our services and resources. As our Technology Partner, we provide our reseller with incentives/discounts while delivering the same quality of service our other customers expect from us. As our reseller, you agree to abide to this agreement. Furthermore, reseller also agree to enforce the same AUP to their customers/clients. We consider a violation of our AUP by your customer as a violation by you. Depending on the nature of the violation, we reserve the right to suspend your customer’s service or all your service until further investigation. Resellers also agree to pay charges/fines as described in this agreement for each AUP violation.
The SSH policy for Shared Hosting Customers (see above) also applies to Resellers and their clients. Furthermore, resellers agree not offer trial accounts and sell plans with unlimited bandwidth and/or unlimited space.
Addendum for Collocation Customers
You may gain access to your collocated servers/equipment through an escorted work visit. Please send us a work visit request at least 24 hours prior to the scheduled work visit.
Fluid Hosting does not maintain your server/equipment. In the event of a failed hardware/component, you will have to provide your own replacement parts. You may choose to have us work on your server at a rate of $90/hour (during our normal business hours) or $180/hour (outside of our normal business hours), billable in 10-minute increment. Unless otherwise stated in your purchase order, server administration and other consultation service is not included. When needed, we can provide you with server administration/consultation service at a rate of $90/hour (during normal business hours) or $180 hour (outside of our normal business hours), billable in 10-minute increment.
Addendum for Dedicated Server Customers
We will maintain the integrity of the server we supply you. In the event of a hardware failure, we will replace the failed component within 8 hours after such failed component has been identified. After this 8-hour period, our SLA guarantee will take effect. Dedicated server customer does not have any permission to work on our servers. All works must be done by our staff and all hardware parts will be provided by us.
Server administration is not included in your service unless you have purchased a managed dedicated server solution. When needed, we can provide you with server administration/consultation service at a rate of $90/hour, billable in 10-minute increment.
Privacy Statement/Policy
For our own internal purposes, we record your IP and may use cookies to track your activities while accessing our web sites/servers. Upon signing up for our services, you will enter your personal/corporate information (name, physical/email addresses, credit card number, et cetera) to be stored in our system.
We are committed to respecting and safeguarding your privacy. And such, we will not share, sell, and disclose any part of your personal/corporate information to an unknown and unauthorized third party. Please note, however, some personal/corporate information you entered is already readily available to the public (such as through your domain whois information, et cetera). Unless otherwise requested, the personal/corporate information you entered during domains registration will also be publicly available. We may share your personal/corporate information only to our business partners, prospective investors/partners, and our own staff. You agree to receive communication from us. Such communication includes, but not limited to, system and/or maintenance notifications, products/services offered by us and/or our partners, newsletters, et cetera.
You are the sole owner of the data/programs stored on our system/servers. As such, we will not share, sell, and disclose any part of your data/program to any third party, except when requested by the local/federal authority with a court order. Furthermore, except for backup purposes and/or when requested by you, we shall not make or initiate copies of your data. Upon service cancellation or termination, Fluid Hosting shall remove all your data on our system/servers.
Limitation of Liability
Other than the refund policy given above, under no circumstances shall we be liable for any indirect, incidental, reliance, special, punitive or consequential damages including, but not limited to, loss of profits and/or opportunities resulting from any disruption of service and/or any acts of God, unauthorized access, alteration, theft, corruption, or destruction of any equipment hosted within our network. Our cumulative liability to you shall not exceed an amount equivalent to the amount you pay in three months prior to the notice of the damage claim. You should be responsible for any additional fees including, but not limited to, damage claim fees, attorney fees, et cetera.
Miscellaneous
You agree that all court claims and proceedings should be made in the state of Pennsylvania where Fluid Hosting is registered. All applicable fees including, but not limited to, attorney fees, court fees, and et cetera should be paid by you. We reserve the right to change this agreement any time without any prior notification. We will always maintain the latest revision to this agreement to you through Fluid Hosting main web site located at http://www.fluidhosting.com/msa.php. It is your duty to always check the newest revision to this agreement.
