1. Introduction
This AUP forms part of the Agreement applicable to all services and products offered by HostAfrica and contracted for by customers and is designed to ensure compliance with the relevant laws of South Africa and protect HostAfrica’s network, its services and products, customers and the internet community as a whole from improper and/or illegal activity over the internet. This AUP describes the conduct and practices that HostAfrica regards as unacceptable on the part of the customer and/or visitor to our website and explains the rights that HostAfrica has to respond to such unacceptable conduct and practices. Please take the time to review this AUP, as all service and product agreements will be subject to the provisions of this AUP. By accessing our website, or using our services and products, you agree to be bound without limitation or qualification to the rules, terms and conditions set out in this AUP.
2. Unacceptable Use and Prohibited Activities
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HostAfrica’s product and services may only be used for lawful purposes and activities. HostAfrica prohibits any use of its services and products, including the transmission, distribution and storage of any material or content using HostAfrica’s network that transgress, violate or are in non-compliance with any laws of South Africa, including, but not limited to:
- any violation of with local and international laws prohibiting child pornography, obscenity, discrimination (including racial, gender or religious slurs), hate speech, speech designed to incite violence, intimidation or hatred and exchange control ;
- any activity designed to defame, abuse, stalk, harass or physically threaten any individual in South Africa or beyond its borders; including any attempt to link to, post, transmit or otherwise distribute any inappropriate or defamatory material;
- any infringement on intellectual property rights and copyright laws including materials protected by local and international copyright, trademarks and trade secrets and furthermore including any sale, transmission or distribution of pirated or illegal software, video and/or voice content and recordings;
- any violation of another's right to privacy, including any effort to collect personal data of third parties without their consent or contrary to the applicable data privacy laws;
- any fraudulent activity, including dubious financial practices, such as pyramid schemes; the impersonation of another customer without their consent; or any attempt to enter into a transaction or agreement with HostAfrica on behalf of another customer without their consent; and
- any activity which threatens the functioning, security or integrity of HostAfrica’s network and services including, but not limited to:
- any efforts to attempt to gain unlawful and unauthorised access to the network or circumvent any of the security measures established by HostAfrica;
- any effort to use HostAfrica’s services, equipment and products to circumvent the user authentication or security of any host, network or account ("cracking" or "hacking");
- forging of any TCP/IP packet headers ("spoofing") or any part of the headers of an email or a newsgroup posting;
- any effort to breach or attempt to breach the security of another customer or attempt to gain access to any other person's computer, software, or data without the knowledge and consent of such person;
- any activity which threatens to disrupt the services offered by HostAfrica through "denial of service attacks" ("DOS"/"DDOS"), flooding of a network, overloading a service or any unauthorised probes ("scanning" or "nuking") of others' networks;
- any activity which in any way threatens the security of HostAfrica’s network by knowingly posting, transmitting, linking to or otherwise distributing any information or software, which contains a virus, trojan horse, worm, lock, mailbom, cancelbot, malware, botnet or other harmful, destructive or disruptive component;
- unauthorised access, use, probe, scan of monitoring of a systems security or authentication measures, data or traffic, without HostAfrica’s explicit, written consent;
- running services and applications with known vulnerabilities and weaknesses, e.g. insufficient anti-automation attacks, any traffic amplification attacks, including recursive DNS attacks and SMTP relay attacks; and
- employing posts or programs which consume excessive CPU time or storage space, permits the use of mail services, mail forwarding capabilities, POP accounts, or auto responders other than for their own account; or resale of access to CGI scripts installed on our servers.
- sustained network throughput of more than:
- 200Mbit/s for longer than 240 minutes or
- 500Mbit/s for longer than 20 minutes
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Spam and Unsolicited Electronic Mail
It is contrary to HostAfrica’s policy for customers to use our servers to effect or participate in any of the following activities:
- sending unsolicited bulk mail for marketing, commercial or any other purposes (political, religious or commercial) to persons (natural and juristic) who/which have not consented to receiving such mail;
- using any part of HostAfrica’s infrastructure for the purpose of unsolicited bulk mail, whether sending, receiving, bouncing, or facilitating such mail;
- operating or maintaining mailing lists without the express permission of all recipients listed. In particular, HostAfrica does not permit the sending of "opt-out" mail, where the recipient must opt out of receiving mail which they did not request. For all lists, the sender must maintaining meaningful records of when and how each recipient requested mail. HostAfrica may also monitor customers deemed to be operating "cleaning lists", which is using illegally obtained email addresses, but removing addresses as complaints arise. Should HostAfrica, at its discretion, believe that this is the case, it will be treated as SPAM.
- failing to promptly remove from lists invalid or undeliverable addresses or addresses of unwilling recipients or a recipient who has indicated s/he wishes to be removed from such list, or failing to provide the recipient with a facility to opt-out;
- using HostAfrica’s service to collect responses from unsolicited email sent from accounts on other Internet hosts or e-mail services that violate this AUP or the AUP of any other Internet service provider;
- advertising any facility on HostAfrica’s infrastructure in unsolicited bulk mail (e.g. a web site advertised in spam);
- including HostAfrica’s name in the header or by listing an IP address that belongs to HostAfrica in any unsolicited email whether sent through HostAfrica’s network or not; and
- failure to secure a customer's mail server against public relay as a protection to themselves and the broader Internet community. Public relay occurs when a mail server is accessed by a third party from another domain and utilised to deliver mails, without the authority or consent of the owner of the mail-server. Mail servers that are unsecured against public relay often become abused by unscrupulous operators for spam delivery and upon detection such delivery must be disallowed.
- any 'magical' or supernatural service which is offered in exchange for payment; be it direct or implied through 'strong-arm' donation practices.
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Public Space and Third Party Content and sites
- HostAfrica has no power to control the content of the information passing over the internet and its applications, including third party websites (whether accessible through the HostAfrica network websites; contained within a directory of links on the HostAfrica network or sites displayed as search results); e-mail; chat rooms; news groups; or other similar fora and our network is merely a conduit or means of access and transmission. HostAfrica will not be held liable, whether directly or indirectly, for any loss or damage of any kind incurred as a result of, or in connection with your use of, or reliance on, any of the above-mentioned content.
- Access to public internet spaces, such as bulletin boards, Usenet groups, chat rooms and moderated forums, is entirely voluntary and at your own risk. It remains your responsibility to review and evaluate any such content, and that any and all risk associated with the use of, or reliance on, such content rests with you.
- HostAfrica employees do not moderate any of these services, or your communications, transmissions or use of these services. We do not undertake any responsibility for any content contained therein, or for any breaches of your right to privacy that you may experience as a result of accessing such spaces.
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Usenet Newsgroups
The customer is responsible for determining and familiarising himself with the written policies of a newsgroup before posting to it or participating in any discussions. The customer must abide by these rules at all times, which can be obtained from the group's administrators/moderators, upon request. The following are prohibited practices with regard to Usenet newsgroups and HostAfrica reserves the right to delete and/or cancel posts which violate the following conditions:
- excessive cross-posting of the same article to multiple newsgroups;
- posting of irrelevant or off-topic material to newsgroups (also known as USENET spam);
- posting binaries to a non-binary newsgroup; and
- posting adverts, solicitations, or any other commercial messages unless the guidelines of the newsgroup in question explicitly permit them.
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Protection of Minors
HostAfrica prohibits customers from using HostAfrica’s services to harm or attempt to harm a minor, including, but not limited to, by hosting, possessing, disseminating, distributing or transmitting material that is unlawful, including child pornography.
3. Determination of Breach of this AUP
- HostAfrica reserve the right in its sole and unfettered discretion for determining what constitutes a violation of this AUP, provided that such decisions will be taken in line with the applicable legislation concerning the protection of consumer rights in force at the time, as applicable.
4. Take-Down Procedures
- HostAfrica has a procedure in place for the notice and take-down of illegal material. In compliance with section 77 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act (No. 25 of 2002) HostAfrica will handle this process and can be reached at +27-21-554-3096 or abuse@hostafrica.com.
- Customers are also notified of the content and procedures of the HostAfrica Code of Conduct which may be used against any Internet service provider who fails to comply with the code of conduct.
- HostAfrica has appointed ISPA as the official takedown agent. Their details are as below: Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA) Address: PO Box 518, Noordwyk, 1687 Telephone: 010 500 1200 Email: complaints@ispa.org.za
5. Complaints and Procedures
- HostAfrica cannot handle complaints concerning networks or users that do not have service contracts with us or our affiliates, or are outside of our control. It is the customer's responsibility to familiarise himself or herself with the procedure set out below and report any cases of violation of this AUP to HostAfrica’s designated complaints handling agent. In order for HostAfrica to thoroughly investigate the complaint and take appropriate action, all complaints must be in writing, sent via fax or e-mail and contain as much information as possible, including, but not limited to:
- the origin of abuse or offense, including the website, full mail headers, relevant log file extracts etc.;
- any contact details for the source of the complaint;
- a brief explanation why the incident is considered to be an offense.
- HostAfrica discourages anonymous complaints being made via this service, and urges complainants to supply their name and contact details to us. Such information will not be released, except where required by law enforcement. Anonymous complaints will however be acted upon as long as sufficient detail as outlined above is supplied.
6. Consequences of Breach of the AUP
- In order to enable HostAfrica to monitor adherence to this AUP by customers and their users and upon receipt of a complaint, or having become aware of an incident, HostAfrica reserves the rights to take any of the following steps:
- examine customers' mail servers to confirm that mails are not being sent from such mail servers through public relay and the results of such checks can be made available to the customer;
- examine the mail servers of any customers using HostAfrica’s mail servers for "smarthosting" (when the user relays its mail via a HostAfrica mail server to a mail server of its own or vice versa) or similar services at any time to ensure that the servers are properly secured against public relay. All relay checks will be done in strict accordance with HostAfrica’s Privacy Policy and the laws of South Africa;
- intercept and/or block any incoming or outgoing electronic mail sent to or from HostAfrica’s network or through the use of any services provided by HostAfrica to the customer should such electronic mail be identified as possible spam or be in contravention of HostAfrica’s General and/or applicable Specific Terms and Conditions;
- suspend or terminate any and all services or limit portions thereof provided to the customer should it be determined that the customer has engaged in the transmission of spam, whether done so knowingly or otherwise and or has used the services and network of HostAfrica for any purpose or activities in violation of this AUP;
- pursue any civil legal remedies at its disposal in terms of the General Terms and Condition applicable Specific Terms and Conditions and in law, in addition to any of the remedies set-out hereunder;
- if such violation is suspected to be a criminal offence, HostAfrica may notify the appropriate law enforcement department of such violation and provide them with all such necessary information and records, as required by law;
- in the case of a network issue, inform the user's network administrator of the incident and request the network administrator or network owner to address the incident in terms of this AUP;
- in the case of individual users, warn the user; suspend the user's account and/or revoke or cancel the user's network access privileges completely;
- assist other networks or website administrators in investigating credible suspicions of any activity listed in this AUP;
- institute civil or criminal proceedings;
- share information concerning the incident with other Internet access providers;
- in all cases, charge the offending parties for administrative and legal costs, including machine and human time lost due to the incident, attorney fees, costs resulting from Postmaster responses to complaints from and the clean-up of unsolicited commercial mailings and/or unauthorised bulk mailings and/or news server violations, cleanup and investigation fees;
- suspend or cancel the clients service(s); and
- withhold any refund, account credit or prepaid amounts.
7. Interception of Communications
- HostAfrica is required in terms of the Regulation of Interception and Provision of Communication-related Information Act 17 of 2003 to intercept communications. Any interception of communications shall be done strictly in accordance with the requirements of this Act, as and when required by this Act.
8. Amendment of Policy
- HostAfrica reserves the right to make changes to this AUP or update it from time to time. Where a major change is made, customers will be informed through a notice on our website. Customers and website visitors bear the responsibility to ensure that they have read the changes or updates as the case may be. If there are any questions regarding this Acceptable Use Policy you may contact us using the information below:
- E-mail: support@hostafrica.com
- Street address: 12 Helena Ave, Helena Heights, Somerset West, Cape Town, 7130, South Africa
- Website: https://www.hostafrica.com/rw