Terms and Conditions

This is an agreement between Geekz (Technical Promotions Australia, us, we, our) ABN: 19 701 360 761 and our client (you).

By using and/or accessing any aspect of your hosting account – for example by logging into the control panel, using the sitebuilder, setting up an email address, logging into ftp etc – you accept to and are bound by these Terms of use under all applicable Australian Law. We may update these terms of use from time to time without notice to you. Please check our terms regularly for the latest version.

Our services

We will provide you with a variety of resources, such as information, support, account information, support, an optional newsletter and information guides. This may also include new services and unlisted services, and downloads, all which are subject to the Terms of use. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone at our sole discretion.

Use of content

You may not modify, copy, distribute, transmit, display, perform, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any information, images / graphics, use, edit, store or modify code from our web site, products and services obtain from our web site without express written consent from us.

If you are found to breach this agreement, we reserve the right to terminate your account without notice, and/or seek compensation for any of the above breaches.

You agree not to publicly display our company email addresses on other web sites, forums or any other medium. You agree and accept that you will be liable for any damages incurred as a result of your actions.

Your agree you will not damage relations, reputation or goodwill with our current, future and prospective clients by use of your web site hosting account in any way. This can be by, but not limited to email, live chat, forums, web sites, telephone and may include threatening, attempting to damage business relations or reputation, providing incorrect information, extortion, harassment, improper conduct, abuse, swearing, publishing and distribution of any communication, web site content, or other unlawful activities. We also reserve the right to seek and claim damages and losses.

Lawful and acceptable use

You will not use any of our services for unlawful and unacceptable use. This includes using the services in any way which could damage, disable, overburden, impair any of our services or interfere with another users use of our services. This includes spamming, child pornography, warez, IRC scripts, bots, pirated software, Chat servers, IP scanners, bruteforce password cracking software, mail bombers, depiction of violence via written imagery or audio means, escrow systems, High-Yield Interest Programs (HYIP), Investment Sites (FOREX, E-Gold Exchange, Second Life/Linden Exchange, Ponzi, MLM/Pyramid Scheme), Sale of any controlled substance without prior proof of appropriate permit(s), Prime Banks Programs, Lottery/Gambling Sites, Hateful/Racist/Harassment oriented sites, Hacker focused sites/archives/programs, Sites promoting illegal activities, Forums and/or websites that distribute or link to warez/pirated/illegal content, Bank Debentures/Bank Debenture Trading Programs, Fraudulent Sites (Including, but not limited to sites listed at aa419.org & escrow-fraud.com), Mailer Pro, Broadcast or Streaming of Australian or International Live Sporting Events (AFL, NRL, FIFA, NASCAR, NFL, UFC, MLB, NBA, WWE, WWF, NHL, etc)

You may not attempt to gain unauthorised access to our services by any means, including hacking, another persons account, networks connected to ours and password mining.

You may not attempt to mass download the files of this entire website to another location on a frequency a reasonable person would consider as frequent. If you wish to backup your site you should use the backup facility built into your control panel.

Any account found connecting to a third party network or system without authorisation from the third party is subject to suspension. Access to networks or systems outside of your direct control must be with expressed written consent from the third party. Technical Promotions Australia may, at its discretion, request and require documentation to prove access to a third party network or system is authorised.

Sites not complying with our acceptable use policies may be suspended or terminated without further notice or recourse.

You may only obtain information and services through the means which they were intended to be used.

Zero Tolerance Spam Policy

We take a zero tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited e-mail, bulk emailing, and spam. “Safe lists” and purchased lists will be treated as spam. Any user who sends out spam will have their account terminated with or without notice.

Sites advertised via SPAM (Spamvertised) may not be hosted on our servers. This provision includes, but is not limited to SPAM sent via fax, phone, email, instant messaging, or usenet/newsgroups. No organization or entity listed in the ROKSO may be hosted on our servers. Any account which results in our IP space being blacklisted will be immediately suspended and/or terminated.

Technical Promotions Australia reserves the right to require changes or disable as necessary any web site, account, database, or other component that does not comply with its established policies, or to make any such modifications in an emergency at its sole discretion. We reserve the right to charge the holder of the account used to send any unsolicited e-mail a clean up fee or any charges incurred for blacklist removal. This cost of the clean up fee is entirely at the discretion of Technical Promotions Australia.

Governing law

This Agreement, your rights and obligations and all actions contemplated by this Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the Australia and the State of Tasmania (where this business is formally registered), as if the Agreement was a contract wholly entered into and wholly performed within the State of Tasmania. You agree that any action to enforce this Agreement or any matter relating to your use of the Services shall be brought exclusively in the Australian Court for the district of Tasmania, or if there is no jurisdiction in such court, then in a state court in Hobart, Tasmania. You consent to the personal and subject matter jurisdiction of any state or Federal court in Hobart, Tasmania in relation to any dispute arising under this Agreement. You agree that service of process on you by either the Primary Service Provider or Backend Service Provider in relation to any dispute arising under this Agreement may be served upon you by first class mail to the address listed by you in your contact information or by electronically transmitting a true copy of the papers to the email address listed by you in your contact information.

Please also note that since our high-performance servers are physically located in datacenters in the United States of America, content must also meet US-legal-standards for acceptable use.

Suggestions and feedback

No compensation will be given to any suggestions or feedback provided by you. By submitting information, you understand and give us permission to use this information to help better our services, without credit to you.

Eligibility

You must be old enough to form a legally binding contract (i.e. be 18 years or older) to sign-up a Geekz account with Technical Promotions Australia. We do not accept customers from countries at high risk of credit card fraud. These include India, Russia, Ukraine, Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Egypt, Romania, Bulgaria, Mexico, Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Israel. If orders are processed by our automated system they will be flagged, cancelled and the accounts automatically suspended without refund. We reserve the right to block access from these countries to the server without notice to you.

We reserve the right to request additional identity verification information from any customer as an extra form of security checking. This will mostly apply to international customers, and may apply at random to Australian customers as determined by Technical Promotions Australia. Failure to provide this information within a reasonable time period as determined by us could result in suspension of your account until this information is provided.

To the extent permitted by law, using our services indemnifies Technical Promotions Australia from any liability arising from activities undertaken by customers not meeting this eligibility criteria.

Instant Setup / Your details on file

We will setup your account after we have received your first payment and we and/or our payment partner Paypal has screened your order for fraud.

It is your responsibility to provide us with an email address which is not on the domain name that you are signing up under. If there is ever an abuse issue or we need to contact you (for billing reminders etc), the primary email address on file will be used for this purpose. It is your responsibility to ensure the email address on file is current or up to date at all times.

Cancellation

There is no contract term on any account but you must provide us with 14 days notice to cancel an account. Failure to do so will mean you are liable for any fees generated in the 14 days prior to your payment due date and any applicable late fees.

This means you can’t cancel an account when you receive your invoice payment reminder. Once an invoice is generated you are legally obliged under Australian law to make this payment and we reserve the right to take additional steps to recover a non paid amount (see section “Late Payments” below).

Any unused amounts in your account including credits are forefit upon account cancellation.

You agree to supply full payment for the services received from us, on or before the time period during which such services are provided. You agree that until and unless you notify us of your desire to cancel any or all services received, those services will be billed on a recurring basis. If you want to cancel your account, you must follow our official cancellation procedure.

Once a site is cancelled it will be deleted from our servers and is unrecoverable.

Late Payments

Failed payments will have a very short grace period as determined by Technical Promotions and then the account will be suspended and late fees apply. Your account will be automatically unsuspended when the payment and late fee is received.

Continued non-payment of an account will result in account termination without further notice, and all data is lost. Furthermore, your information will then be passed onto a collections agency for debt recovery, if for 60 days your account remains unpaid. This may affect your credit rating and you may be subject to additional fees.

Payment Methods

The only payment method accepted is Paypal in Australian Dollars. You can set up your Paypal account to debit your credit card or bank account. eCheque payments are not considered cleared until the funds clear in our Paypal account.

Overpayment

If you make an overpayment the extra amount will automatically apply against the next invoice you have to pay to us. If you have made an over payment on your account and require a refund, you will receive a refund, minus a $5.00 administration charge, to cover our bank fees and administration.

PHP Scripts on Linux Server

You agree that you will use your hosting account in good faith, and not run applications that will tie up excessive CPU cycles or memory of the web server. Only PHP 5.2 applications and below are supported. Contact us for Windows hosting options which will be quoted separately.

We do not allow Magento installations on our standard hosting packages (Newbie, Casual, Pro, Mega) due to their heavy demands on CPU and memory. If you wish to host a Magento website you will need to contact us for a quote on a different server configuration.

We are not responsible for any issues caused by the scripts you run on your hosting account, and may temporarily suspend your account without notice if your application is excessively affecting other customer’s scripts.

Support

Support is provided by our email-based ticket system, 7 days a week during business hours for standard business and hosting enquiries. Emergency support is available outside of these hours for site down issues. We do not offer telephone support.

We reserve the right to do unscheduled maintenance on the server if it is required, but will do our best to post this information on our announcements page in the client area. We will not pay compensation for any unscheduled downtime. Our target is 99.9% uptime and we consistently reach this level.

While we do not support non-hosting issues, we may quote you on additional script work on your website (for example, to install and configure a script, write content, develop banner graphics or advertising) at our discretion. If you want a quote for a piece of work please let us know. We may refer you to one of our partner sites for work you request where appropriate.

Any abuse of our staff in any medium or format will result in the suspension or termination of your services.

Transfer of Websites to us

We do not offer direct help with website transfers but will do our best to help give you suggestions and insight, and to help you troubleshoot problems that you may encounter as part of our hosting support. The best way to transfer is to use the backup/restore service. If you need us to directly assist in restoring a backup from another provider, a fee will apply. Please also note that because every provider has different server setups, we cannot make guarantees regarding the availability, possibility, or time required to complete an account transfer. We will try our best, but in some cases we may be unable to assist you in a transfer of data from an old host. The fee you pay covers our time and effort in attempting to assist you with getting set up on Geekz.

Connectivity

If the customer is experiencing difficulties or issues with your hosting, you are required to notify us of the issue immediately, so we may resolve the issue. If you do not notify us of the problem, no allowances will be made, as we have not been given a reasonable opportunity to resolve the issue. We are an Internet Presence Provider (IPP) and are not responsible for the users Internet Connectivity through their Internet Service Provider (ISP), connection troubleshooting or computer setup. Please contact your ISP for assistance in these matters.

SSL Certificates

If customers wish to have an SSL Certificate for their website to encrypt/protect sensitive information, please contact us. These are available but will require changing your website to be on its own IP address so that the site can be ringfenced correctly. This carries an additional monthly component as well as the annual cost of the certificate. We can install a certificate provided to us by you from another certificate provider, but an installation fee applies as well as the ongoing monthly cost for the IP address.

Security, Passwords and Responsibility for Security

It is your responsibility to ensure that scripts/programs installed under your account are secure and permissions of directories are set properly, regardless of installation method. When at all possible, set permissions on most directories to 755 or as restrictive as possible. If you are not sure, ask us and we will be happy to give you suggestions and assist wherever we can (short of reviewing your actual software application).

Users are ultimately responsible for all actions taken under their account. This includes the compromise of credentials such as user name and password. It is required that you use a secure password. If a weak password is used, your account may be suspended until you agree to use a more secure password. Audits may be done to prevent weak passwords from being used. If an audit is performed, and your password is found to be weak, we will notify you and allow time for you to change/update your password.

Price Changes

reserves the right to change the advertised price on products and services and any other charges at anytime. Existing customers will be notified prior to any change in their billing cycle charges.

Domain Name Terms and Conditions

Technical Promotions Australia is an official reseller of Distribute IT Domain Name Services. By registering domain names through Technical Promotions Australia you agree and are bound by DistributeIT’s domain name terms of service which form part of our terms of service.

Domain name conditions include:

  • When registering a domain name you may be asked to provide additional up-to-date identity verification, even if you have previously provided identity information to us.
  • It is not possible to assign domain names across separate accounts once ordered. Duplicate accounts can be merged into one account.
  • Fees may apply to change the ownership of any domain name and additional fees and verification may apply to changing the ownership of a .com.au or .net.au domain name. These will be advised to you and quoted before an actual domain name ownership change takes place
  • Transfers of domain names from another provider to Technical Promotions Australia are charged at the rate of registration for that domain.
  • Even if you have cancelled your account with us, the domain name registry may send you a reminder email for a domain on our behalf as your domain comes up for renewal. You won’t be automatically billed for the domain if you no longer have an account with Technical Promotions Australia.
  • By placing a order, we do not guarantee the registration, transfer or renewal of the domain name to you. We make no guarantees about the availability of domain names for registration or transfer, even if the domain name shows as available via our online order form.

Server Limits

You may not:

  • Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.
  • Send more than 500 emails per hour. More than this will result in bouncebacks and a one hour email ban.
  • Send the same email to more than 5,000 recipients (even broken up into multiple lists). If you plan to exceed this limit you need a custom hosting package from us and will need to write to us for a quote.
  • Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
  • Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy) on shared servers.
  • Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
  • Host adult content on your website. This includes sites containing adult toys, or pornography.
  • Run any bit torrent application, tracker, or client. You may link to legal torrents off-site, but may not host or store them on our shared servers.
  • Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities
  • Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc
  • Run cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes.
  • Run any MySQL queries longer than 15 seconds. MySQL tables should be indexed appropriately.
  • When using PHP include functions for including a local file, include the local file rather than the URL. Instead of include(“http://yourdomain.com/include.php”) use include(“include.php”)
  • To help reduce usage, do not force html to handle server-side code (like php and shtml).
  • Only use https protocol when necessary; encrypting and decrypting communications is noticeably more CPU-intensive than unencrypted communications.

Privacy

Our privacy policy available on our privacy policy page forms part of this agreement.

Copyright

Our web site, images, information, services are Copyright 2010 © Technical Promotions Australia, All rights reserved.

Indemnity

You agree that you have provided true and correct information to us and that you will hold hold Technical Promotions Australia harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and claims, including reasonable attorney’s fees asserted against Technical Promotions Australia, its agents, its customers, officers and employees, that may arise or result from any service provided or performed or agreed to be performed or any product sold by customer, its agents, employees or assigns. You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Technical Promotions Australia against liabilities arising out of; (1) any injury to person or property caused by any products sold or otherwise distributed in connection with us; (2) any material supplied by customer infringing or allegedly infringing on the proprietary rights of a third party; (3) copyright infringement and (4) any defective products sold to customers from our server, (5) failure to adhere to domain name registration rules for .com.au and .net.au domains prior to their sale with respect to eligibility for domain name ownership.

Law Enforcement Agencies

Technical Promotions Australia may provide subscriber information to Australian State Police, Australian Federal Police and International Law Enforcement Agencies (e.g. FBI and Interpol) upon their request without notice to you. Technical Promotions Australia fully co-operates with law enforcement agencies.

Disclaimer

TECHNICAL PROMOTIONS AUSTRALIA, EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE AUTHOR DOES NOT WARRANT OR MAKE ANY REPRESENTATIONS REGARDING THE USE OR THE RESULTS OF THE USE OF THE INFORMATION PROVIDED WITHIN THE WEB SITE PUBLICATION IN TERMS OF ITS CORRECTNESS, ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, OR OTHERWISE. NO ORAL OR WRITTEN INFORMATION OR ADVICE GIVEN BY THE AUTHOR SHALL CREATE A WARRANTY OR IN ANY WAY INCREASE THE SCOPE OF THIS WARRANTY.