Terms of Service

Payment Overview

Hosting Suspension Due to Non-Payment

Unpaid invoices will result in suspension of your web hosting services. Since we use VPS dedicated hosting services, payments not met on due date will result in hosting suspension. We strive to give our clients the best website hosting available and to due so, we have to insure payment is made on due date. We will send a notification email regarding unpaid invoices before suspending a past-due account. Your account will be suspended on the due date if payment has not been made. These policies provide our customers with ample time to settle their invoices.

Termination

If outstanding balance is not paid within 7 days after the billing date for the shared package, your hosting account will be terminated for non-payment. Once terminated, it will be a $115 fee per website to reactivate your website + 1 year of hosting prepaid to become active again on our hosting services. After 14 days all back ups of website will be deleted and can no longer be accessed by us or any party.

Hosting Overview

Monster Design Studios Managed Hosting

• Monster Design Studios does not give access to cPanel or admin login to customers due to security of our servers.
• Monster Design Studios does not allow pornographic material.
• Monster Design Studios does not allow unsolicited email and requires opt-in list managers to include at least one single action method of unsubscribing in each email. We reserve the right to limit incoming or outgoing email at any time.
• Monster Design Studios reserves the right to terminate your account at any time without a refund. Reasons for termination include, but are not limited to:
  1. Committing or Promoting any type of illegal activity including fraud, mailbombing, denial of service attacks, storing and/or housing and/or linking to illegal content, including but not limited to, “warez”, “hacking”/”cracking”/”key generators”.
  2. The Services to traffic in illegal drugs, gambling and/or obscene materials.
  3. The Services to misappropriate or infringe the patents, copyrights, trademarks or other intellectual property rights of any third party.
  4. Additionally, Monster Design Studios reserves the right to terminate your account if at any time your site has pornography and/or nudity of any kind, including but not limited to, adult pornography, Anime, child pornography, “adult content” and/or the written word of a sexual nature.
  5. Use of ad-servers, attempts to circumvent quota system owned by ‘nobody’, certain podcasting sites, use of torrent software, proxies, excessive resource usage or ‘core dumping’.
  6. Attempts to circumvent any of our security policies, procedures or systems.
• Monster Design Studios no longer supports IMAP email settings as of January 1st, 2017.

Bandwidth Charges

Higher levels of traffic than normal on your website included email can incur overcharges on a monthly basis. Monster Design Studios can provide web reports for network traffic monitoring and reporting when an overuse is in question. Monster Design Studios can also provide graphs that show customers’ monthly usage when an over use has occurred, which is the average rate, and reflects the amount of bandwidth transferred during the month. The bandwidth charges reflects the average monthly bandwidth in Kilobits per second (Kbps) and in Gb/month. These charges reflect our expenses in network maintenance, upgrades, backbone port charges, leased line loops, and equipment.

Mandatory Security Updates

From time-to-time, we notify our clients of any exploit we deem potentially catastrophic. For an exploit to be considered catastrophic, it must be attacking widely deployed applications that are in use on a majority of servers. For example, but not limited to, software related to DNS, APACHE, CMS and SENDMAIL. Monster Design Studios has the right to temporarily shut your website down until threat has been eliminated.

No Spam Policy

One of the most serious abuses is using your web hosting account to send unsolicited commercial e-mail, otherwise known as Spam. If you utilize our services for web hosting or emails, please know that we strictly prohibit spamming of any sort. We abide by the Federal CAN-SPAM act of 2003 to prevent malicious use of our network to send spam.

The following are examples of Spam and are blatantly contrary to our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy, and will result in termination of your services WITHOUT warning.

Inappropriate E-mail Activities

• Commercial e-mail: Defined as sending unsolicited commercial e-mails. This is prohibited. You are not permitted to use your Monster Design Studios Host account to send unsolicited commercial e-mail. Using an e-mail address or service hosted anywhere on Monster Design Studios Host servers to collect responses from unsolicited commercial e-mail is prohibited. This includes using a throwaway, free e-mail account to promote your Monster Design Studios Host account and redirects for the same account. Using a dedicated or colocated server hosted on our network, to send unsolicited commercial e-mails is also prohibited.

• Mail Bombing: Defined as sending large volumes of unsolicited e-mail to individuals from your Monster Design Studios Host account. This is strictly prohibited.

• Harassment: Defined as sending threatening or harassing e-mail after being requested to stop, is prohibited. Extremely threatening or harassing e-mail never is allowed.

Inappropriate use of Mailing Lists

From time to time, everyone may get a few spam complaints. We understand you don’t have control over someone reporting your legitimate email as spam. Whether you’re emailing someone through a script on your website,  your messages may become flagged as spam. Our goal is to help prevent all spam, but we’re also here to help you reduce or eliminate occurrences of “false positive” spam reports against you. If you follow a few simple practices, you can greatly reduce the chances of sending unsolicited email.

• Purchased Mailing Lists: Mass mailing to purchased mailing lists is not allowed. We allow only opt-in mailing lists. To comply with our no-Spam policy, the recipients on your mailing list must have specifically requested (subscribed) to receive mail from you on this topic. Purchased or inherited lists are, by definition, NOT opt-in. Similarly; it’s not a good idea to start a mailing list about gardening and then post to it about weight loss pills. Opt-in list mailings must include instructions to unsubscribe (opt-out) in every message.
• Do not Use Old Lists: If your list hasn’t been used in the last six months, chances are good that if you suddenly email everyone on it, many will think it’s spam, or the messages will bounce. We suggest that you find a different way to reconnect with those list members before emailing them, such as mailing them an invitation to re-join the list.
• Conference Lists: Many lists are generated from large events, like conferences, trade shows, or networking groups. If you happen to obtain such a list, please know that unless those list members directly opted into your own list or directly gave you consent to contact them, the list is a no-no and we do not consider it opt-in. If you attended a large event created that list from a signup form at your booth or table, or invited attendees of a speaking engagement you gave to sign up for your list, then that IS considered opt-in and you have our approval to communicate with those subscribers.
• Prune Your Lists: If a subscriber doesn’t open your message after several messages, consider removing them. Pruning lists of non-engaged subscribers increases your open rate and reduces the chances those members will report you for spam.

Inappropriate Newsgroup Activities:

• Newsgroup Spamming: This Spam is defined as excessive cross-posting, or posting the same article to several newsgroups. This is prohibited. Generally accepted standards allow no more than 15 newsgroups, or cross-postings, for a single article or substantially similar articles. Such articles may be canceled. You are not allowed to use your Web Hosting based mail facilities to Spam the newsgroups.

• Off topic or inappropriate postings: There is no restriction on content, except as defined by each newsgroup. Continued posting of off-topic articles is prohibited. Please note that commercial advertisements are off-topic and considered Spam in the vast majority of newsgroups.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

Besides the fact that spam is annoying, it’s also illegal. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 describes penalties of up to $16,000USD for spamming, so if you’re not compliant, it may be very costly. The Act also has instructions to help email senders understand the necessary steps to prevent spam. At the approval of the FTC’s website, we are re-posting the main CAN-SPAM guidelines here for your reference:

• Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
• Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
• Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
• Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
• Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
• Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
• Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

For more information on CAN-SPAM compliance and how you can prevent your business from spamming, please visit the FTC’s website with tips.

Summary

We take a very dim view of Spam. It is one of the most annoying things encountered on the Internet. Any Monster Design Studios hosting customer determined to be Spamming will have their services terminated immediately. There is no warning or second chance.

We are not attempting to censor, nor are we attempting to curtail the business of our customers. But as a whole, Spamming hurts our members and us more than it helps the one who does the Spam. Do yourself, and us, a favor: PLEASE DON’T DO IT.

If you know of any Monster Design Studios Host client that is or might be violating this policy, please send a message or, if possible, forward the Spam in full (including headers) to us by contacting us.

Hacked Website Due to Non-Maintenance

All websites are vulnerable to being hacked if your website is not being maintained. You can maintain your website by keeping your WordPress Core Updated along with your plugins being updated. If you choose not to keep these updated and it results in a hack that exploits spam, your account will be terminated immediately without notice. If you do not understand how to keep these updated you can view an article here. Monster Design Studios also offers maintenance packages that keep these updated for you. You are not required to use our maintenance packages, however you are required to keep your website WordPress Core and Plugins updated at all times.

By paying for hosting services with Monster Design Studios, you agree to the terms outlined above.