Acceptable Usage Policy

This Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP) governs the use of SpruceHost’s web hosting service. Violation of our AUP may result in suspension or termination of your service. In the event of a dispute between you and SpruceHost regarding the interpretation of this AUP, SpruceHost’s interpretation, in its reasonable judgment, shall govern the interpretation of the agreement.

The following is the Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP) agreement between SpruceHost and the personal or corporate account holder. SpruceHost provides Web Hosting, web design and script installation. SpruceHost has certain legal and ethical responsibilities consisting with the use of its servers and equipment involved in these services. SpruceHost’s general policy is to act as a provider of Internet presence. SpruceHost reserves the rights to suspend or cancel a customer’s access to any or all services if it is deemed that the policies set forth have been violated.

SpruceHost is designed to serve the web hosting needs of small, independently owned and operated businesses, and the needs of small, personal websites. Our hosting is not designed to support large enterprises or websites with high sustained demand. Our hosting is not designed for websites with a sustained demand that places undue burden on our systems or negatively impacts use by small, independently owned and operated businesses.

SpruceHost is a shared web hosting service, which means that a number of customers’ web sites and other email or storage services are hosted from the same server. Our services are affordable for small business users and small website operators because we divide up the cost and resources of the server among all of the users. SpruceHost uses abuse controls to help ensure that use of our services does not adversely affect the performance of our system or other customers’ sites.

It is not appropriate to use an account primarily as an online storage space or for archiving electronic files. Our services are not designed for this use and are intended to support the media storage of a typical website, not for mass file storage.

Each hosting account has a cap of 200,000 inodes, or unique files.

SpruceHost uses the CloudLinux system to monitor resource use. Accounts which use an extreme level of resources, at our discretion, may be subject to suspension or require an upgrade to a new plan. Please refer to our Resource Limits Policy for full details.

In most cases, your use of our service in compliance with these terms will result in visitors being able to access your website to download and view content as much as they like. However, in the event that any one website exceeds its’ fair share resource limits, access to that account may be temporarily throttled or restricted.

SpruceHost bills for bandwidth on a pay-per-use basis. Extreme spikes in traffic, known as the “digg effect” or “going viral” may cause your bandwidth use to unexpectedly increase. Our servers are designed to scale up your website as traffic increases, however you are ultimately responsible for monitoring your bandwidth use and related costs. SpruceHost strongly encourages the use of best-practice software, such as caching software and image offloading, to reduce your bandwidth costs.

Webhosting customers may create personal email addresses @theirdomain for use in conjunction with their websites. Please note that we reserve the right to limit the storage of email, and your use of our services should not be primarily for hosting email. The primary function of your account should be a working website, not for hosting an undue amount of email accounts.

Many of our accounts contain “unlimited” resources in that we do not place artificial caps on. However, customers should understand that there are physical limits to what can be stored by a server, what can be transmitted over a connection, and what can be run simultaneously. While the term “unlimited” means that we do not place artificial limits, customers should still understand there are physical limits to what can realistically be done on our hosting platform. Customers who exceed the capability of our hosting may need to find more advanced hosting resources for their needs.

You may not publish or transmit via SpruceHost’s service any content that SpruceHost reasonably believes:
a) constitutes child pornography;
b) constitutes pornography;
c) is excessively violent, incites violence, threatens violence, or contains harassing content or hate speech;
d) is unfair or deceptive under the consumer protection laws of any jurisdiction, including chain letters and pyramid schemes;
e) is defamatory or violates a person’s privacy;
f) creates a risk to a person’s safety or health, creates a risk to public safety or health, compromises national security, or interferes with a investigation by law enforcement;
g) improperly exposes trade secrets or other confidential or proprietary information of another person;
h) is intended to assist others in defeating technical copyright protections;
i) clearly infringes on another person’s trade or service mark, patent, or other property right;
j) promotes illegal drugs, violates export control laws, relates to illegal gambling, or illegal arms trafficking;
k) is otherwise illegal or solicits conduct that is illegal under laws applicable to you or to SpruceHost;
l) is otherwise malicious, fraudulent, or may result in retaliation against SpruceHost by offended viewers;

SpruceHost does not accept material such as:
a) Proxy, Warez, Escrow, High Yield Investment Programs (HYIP), illegal Gambling and Lottery sites.
b )Content ‘published or transmitted’ via SpruceHost’s service includes Web content, e-mail, bulletin board postings, chat, and any other type of posting or transmission that relies on any Internet service provided by SpruceHost.

It is the user’s responsibility to take regular backups of each hosting account. SpruceHost maintains data backups for disaster recovery purposes, however these are not readily available for users to restore. SpruceHost can manually restore these backups upon request for a $10 fee. We highly encourage all users to take regular backups of their own hosting account, or to purchase our automatic backup service.

SpruceHost conducts daily and weekly security scans of our server. If Malware or security holes are detected on your account, we may automatically patch them or upgrade your scripts. If we are unable to do so, we may contact you to urge that you do so yourself immediately. If a security hole or malware issue is posing a threat to the data of our customers or to your end users, we may suspend your website until you resolve the issue and secure your account.

You are responsible for the security of your website. It is critical that you use secure passwords which are not reused elsewhere, and that you change them frequently. You should regularly update your website to the latest version, so that outdated scripts and security holes are not left running on your website.

For any emails sent from your SpruceHost account you must adhere to the following rules:

a) Your intended recipients have given their consent to receive e-mail via some affirmative means, such as an opt-in procedure;
b) Your procedures for soliciting consent include reasonable means to ensure that the person giving consent is the owner of the e-mail address for which the consent is given;
c) You may not obscure the source of your e-mail in any manner.
d) You otherwise comply with the CAN SPAM Act and other applicable law.

These policies apply to messages sent using your SpruceHost service, or to messages sent from any network by you or any person on your behalf that directly or indirectly refer the recipient to a site hosted via your SpruceHost service..

You may not send any unsolicited e-mail, either in bulk or individually, to any person who has indicated that they do not wish to receive it. You must comply with the rules of any other network you access or participate in using your SpruceHost’s services.

You may not publish, distribute, or otherwise copy in any manner any music, software, art, or other work protected by copyright law unless:
a) you have been expressly authorized by the owner of the copyright for the work to copy the work in that manner.
b) you are otherwise permitted by established United States copyright law to copy the work in that manner.

SpruceHost will terminate the service of repeat copyright infringers.

You must have valid and current information on file with your domain name registrar for any domain hosted on the SpruceHost network.

SpruceHost is under no duty, and does not by this AUP undertake a duty, to monitor or police our customers’ activities and disclaims any responsibility for any misuse of the SpruceHost network.

You may not engage in illegal, abusive, or irresponsible behavior, including:

a) Unauthorized access to or use of data, systems or networks, including any attempt to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of a system or network or to breach security or authentication measures (including those belonging to SpruceHost and its customers) without express authorization of the owner of the system or network;
b) monitoring data or traffic on any network or system without the authorization of the owner of the system or network;
c) Interference with service to any user, host or network including, without limitation, mail bombing, flooding, deliberate attempts to overload a system and broadcast attacks;
d) Use of an Internet account or computer without the owner’s authorization, including, but not limited to Internet scanning (tricking other people into releasing their passwords), password robbery, security hole scanning, and port scanning;
e) Forging of any TCP-IP packet header or any part of the header information in an e-mail or a newsgroup posting; or
f) Any conduct that is likely to result in retaliation against the SpruceHost network.
g) Use of SpruceHost’s network in a way that unreasonably interferes with SpruceHost’s other customers use of the network