Responsible use of the service and disciplinary actions.

In order to protect the integrity and security of our systems and the related resources we expect that our customers act responsibly. When you use a service made available by Hosting Studio, in whatever shape or form you may do, you automatically accept your responsibility to abide by the Ts & Cs.

We will promptly report any violation of these Ts & Cs directly to the customer by email, and we reserve the right to suspend or terminate the access to some or all of the services we provide should we find out, after thorough investigation, that the account has been used repeatedly in an inappropriate way. Should such a situation occur, no refund of any amount will be owed to the customer by Hosting Studio.

A further reason to suspend your account is represented by a payment failing to reach us within the deadline specified in the invoice.

Abuse of our servers.

Any attempt to cause damage to any of our servers or to any of our customers is strictly prohibited and will result in immediate closure of the account.

Unauthorized use of another person's account/computer.

We will react promptly and firmly against any use or attempted use of a computer or an Internet account associated to another person without their explicit WRITTEN consent.
The attempts include the 'internet scanning' (deceive other people in order to obtain their passwords), password theft and a search for bugs in the security systems.

Any unauthorized use of an account or computer (ours or belonging to a third party) will automatically trigger disciplinary actions by Hosting Studio. These actions include: warning messages, suspension or termination of your account up to any legal action which may be necessary, depending on the seriousness of the abuse ascribed to the customer being investigated.

Contents of your Web site:

The following contents are strictly prohibited on our servers and will incur in the cancellation of your account without notice and without any refund whatsoever:

Adult contents (pornography and pedophilia)
Online Bets or gambling
Use of the site or email for spamming (unsolicited email)
Software which has been copied illegally or contents which violate the International Copyright laws (like mp3 songs and similar unless it's your own music or music of which you can prove to be the copyright owner)
Contents which instigate or encourage violence, occultism, spiritism, satanism, social revolt, terrorism or any unlawful action. Hosting reserves the right to decide what contents fall into this category.

Banned scripts.

For security reasons and/or excessive bandwidth consumption which could have bad repercussions on other customers the following is not permitted on our servers:

Executable files are not permitted. This includes: .exe, .com, bat. Also the following programs are not permitted
Hackers programs or archives
Pirated software
Warez Sites
IRC Bots
Proxy Servers
nph-proxy
The Anonymizer
UltimateBB
Ikonboard
Greymatter (all versions)
IRC Egg Drops & IRC related programs.(chat software)
formmail.pl
lstmrge.cgi
Shell, SSH, Telnet Scripts and Shell, SSH, Telnet Alternatives
Any script that uses & processes a massive number of flatfiles or large flat databases.

Server downtime

Due to the nature of the software itself and the way the Internet is structured it is not possible to guarantee that your site will be up and accessible 24/7 under every condition and circumstance. Our statistics show that our average uptime percentage is 99.7%. Even if it is extremely rare, there may be occasions where we may need to perform essential emergency maintenance on our servers and this may result in a short interruption of the service. We will always endeavor, whenever possible, to give sufficient advance notice, though this may not always be possible. In no occasion can any customer claim any compensation of any kind for any loss incurred by service disruption.

Unsolicited commercial emails (SPAM)

Sending unsolicited commercial emails (spam) is an unauthorized use of email. Using email to send spam constitutes a valid reason for suspending or terminating your account.
Unsolicited commercial emails are considered a nuisance and are not generally welcome by Internet users.

Sending unsolicited messages using messaging software or chat rooms will inevitably cause us to suspend or terminate an account.
Sending a message to more than one newsgroup which is completely unrelated to the subject of the email will also be considered spam.

Email is a means to communicate from one person to another, it is not a mass communication tool.

Rules for payment.

All our accounts are prepaid with an annual payment for the shared hosting or with a monthly instalment for our dedicated servers customers and can be cancelled at any time with a notice period of 30 (thirty) days. All prices are guaranteed for the duration of the prepaid term. The accounts can be paid using a credit card or a direct bank transfer. We reserve the right to change the price of our services at any moment, giving a 30 day advance notice to our existing customers.
In case of a price increase, the new price will come into effect at renewal time for our annual prepaid customers and on the next billing cycle from the time the increase applies for our monthly payment customers as well as for new services or new accounts opened by an existing customer. Failing to pay an invoice within its deadline will cause Hosting Studio to send an automatic payment reminder.
After 7 days from the date of sending the reminder the account will inevitably be suspended (which will make accessing the site and the emails impossible) until payment has been received by Hosting Studio. Should a reminder email be sent out because of a delay in paying Hosting Studio will apply an administrative fee of Euro 15 for every late payment.

All payments are to be made in Euros (EUR). Prices quoted on this site are VAT EXCLUSIVE for our Italian customers only.

Hosting Service cancellation.

If forced by the circumstances, we reserve the right to cancel our hosting service at any moment and without obligation to offer any explanation, giving an advance notice of 90 days. All sums paid before the cancellation of service will be refunded by us according to the percentage of service that hasn't been used starting from the 90th day from the date of issuing a service cancellation notice by Hosting Studio or from the date a customer physically transfers his site to another hosting company. In this latter circumstance we will consider as last day of service with Hosting Studio the first day that our statistics show no traffic at all generated for the site, thus indicating a complete DNS propagation.

Hosting agreement cancellation by customer.

You can cancel your hosting agreement with Hosting Studio at any time giving us a WRITTEN NOTICE (by fax or email). If applicable, we will refund any money for the unused time, calculated from the 30th day after Hosting Studio receives and acknowledges your cancellation notice. Please note that the minimum term for our dedicated servers service is three months. All customers asking for a cancellation of their hosting agreement within the first 12 months of their agreement for a package which includes a free Internet domain will receive a refund of whatever period of time has not been used LESS the cost of the domain registration which is Euro 10.50 for a .com, .net, .org and .it domain and Euro 19.95 for a .co.uk, .biz and .info domain. Cancellation may be sent by email to "accounts@hostingstudio.net" and will be acknowledged by Hosting studio, stating the agreement termination date and the date the service will therefore be terminated.

Lawful purposes.

We reserve the right to refuse our services to anybody. Transmission of whatever material violating any European, American Federal, State or Local Law is strictly prohibited. This includes any material which is protected by international copyright laws (such as mp3 files or Divx), material which is obscene or seditious or protected by trade secret. Hosting Studio solemnly prohibits anybody from using their own servers for the propagation, distribution, custody, processing, storage or any other manipulation of any material which is considered morally loose, obscene, pornographic (including pedophilia), satanic, occult as well as any material we consider offensive towards the common moral sense and decency. Judging what material falls in the above categories is a no-appeal decision of Hosting Studio's Direction.

Non liability

We will not be considered liable under any circumstance for whatever loss or damage your business may suffer as a result of your purchasing services from us. Because of the nature of Internet and for the always pending chance of a hardware failure (though we employ vast resources to ensure that this will not be the case and to safeguard the integrity of your data) we do not offer any guarantee of any kind, whether implicit or explicit, for the services we offer. This includes data loss caused by delays, maintenance or any emergency repair which requires a sudden and unannounced intervention.

Privacy Laws and Data Protection.

Hosting Studio declare that all customer confidential and personal data gathered during the sale and order procedure of our services will not be disclosed to anybody, with the exception of a specific request by a Police body or an investigating Court. This will always be the case even when related to former customer of ours.

Backup of your site.

The customer is totally responsible for the backup copy of his site. In no circumstance will HostinG studio be held responsible for data loss incurred by an accidental deletion of files.

Technical Support

Technical support is available, 24/7, by our Support Helpdesk at http://support.hostingstudio.net.

Please note that our support is limited ONLY to matters related to your Internet domain, email functions and the features of our domain control panel (with the exclusion of any script installed by the customer, be it CGI, PHP or mySQL).

Failing to observe any of the Ts & Cs as set above will be a valid reason to suspend your account an start an investigation on the matter.

PAGE LAST UPDATED ON 23 OCTOBER 2003.