Terms of Use

General terms and conditions

Your agreement with Hostnali Webhost (the “Agreement”) is made up of these General Terms and Conditions, which apply to all Services; the Product Terms and Conditions for the particular Hosting Services you buy; the Acceptable Use Policy; the Refund Policy; and the Privacy Policy. The Agreement takes effect on the date of the email in which Hostnali Webhost confirms acceptance of your order, or on the date you accept these terms and conditions, whichever is earlier.

Defined terms

Some words used in the Agreement have particular meanings:

• “Acceptable Use Policy” or “AUP” means the Hostnali Webhost Acceptable Use Policy.
• “Affiliate” means a subsidiary or holding company of either party to this Agreement, and any subsidiary of such a holding company.
• “Business Day” or “Business Hours” means 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays in South Africa.
• “Confidential Information” means all information disclosed by one of us to the other, whether before or after the effective date of the Agreement, that the recipient should reasonably understand to be confidential, including (i) for you, all information transmitted to or from, or stored on, your Hosted System, and (ii) for both of us, information that is marked or otherwise clearly designated as confidential. Information that one of us develops independently, without reference to the other’s Confidential Information, or that becomes available to one of us other than through a breach of the Agreement or of applicable law, is not Confidential Information of the other party.
• “Country Specific Terms” means any addendum incorporated into your Agreement where part of your Services is provided from a jurisdiction outside Kenya for which we have special legal terms.
• “Hosted System” means the combination of hardware, software and networking elements that make up an information technology system. Depending on the Services you buy, the Hosted System may be a dedicated system for your use only, the right to use parts of a shared system that Hostnali Webhost maintains for many customers, or a combination of dedicated and shared elements.
• “Hosting Services” means (i) Hostnali Webhost’s provision of the Hosted System described in the Services Description for your use, and (ii) Support.
• “Product Terms and Conditions” means the terms and conditions for the particular Hosting Services you buy.
• “Services Description” means a written description of the Hosted System and/or Supplementary Services you buy from Hostnali Webhost, and the related fees, that is incorporated by reference in the Agreement, including any “plan” or other named service you select as part of an online order.
• “Service Level Guarantee” means (i) any guarantee identified as a “Service Level Guarantee” in the applicable Product Terms and Conditions, or (ii) any provision that gives a specified credit or financial remedy for an identified failure to deliver or provide the Services.
• “Services” means the Hosting Services and Supplementary Services together.
• “Supplementary Services” means services you buy from Hostnali Webhost other than the Hosting Services, including time-and-materials professional or consulting services (such as database administration), one-time or non-recurring services that are not part of Support (such as support for the applications you run on your Hosted System), and any other services identified as “Supplementary Services” in the applicable Services Description.
• “Support” has the meaning given in the applicable Product Terms and Conditions.

Domain name registration

Hostnali Webhost offers domain name registration and renewal services in partnership with ICANN-accredited registrars and the relevant country-code registries, and processes registrations and renewals through these registrars at its discretion.

• Promotional offers, including introductory rates, promotional rates or any other non-regular pricing, are available to new customers only and are valid for the initial term only. All domain names renew at the regular renewal rate.
• You are responsible for checking and renewing your domain names on time. Hostnali Webhost is not liable for the loss of a domain name because of a late renewal, a missed renewal reminder, or a failure of our system to send a renewal reminder.
• Domain names that are opted in to the Automatic Domain Renewal service, and any optional features associated with them, are renewed automatically 6 days before expiry, for the minimum term available for that domain type and at the regular renewal rate. You are responsible for all renewal costs. You can opt in or out of Automatic Domain Renewal in the Client Area.
• If your hosting plan includes a free domain name, Hostnali Webhost may renew that domain name for you on expiry as part of your hosting plan’s benefits, regardless of your Automatic Domain Renewal settings.
• You may not transfer a domain name to another registrar during the first 60 days after its initial registration, or within 60 days of a successful transfer. Hostnali Webhost may deny any such transfer request.
• Hostnali Webhost may, but is not obliged to, place your domain name in a Domain Lock status to prevent unauthorised or hostile transfers.
• Domain transfer-out is included only for active domain names registered or renewed through Hostnali Webhost at the regular rate. Expired domain names, and domain names bought at a promotional rate, can be transferred to another registrar on payment of a Domain Transfer Fee, which depends on the domain type and is subject to applicable taxes.

Termination, plan changes and refunds

Hostnali Webhost may suspend or terminate your Service in circumstances that include, but are not limited to, the following.

Non-payment of fees

You are in breach of the Agreement if you do not pay amounts due on time, including domain registration fees, hosting fees, upgrade fees, VPS or dedicated server fees, and fees for any other service offered by Hostnali Webhost. We may suspend or terminate the affected Services without notice, and we are not liable for any data loss or other damage that results.

Breach of the Agreement

You are in breach of the Agreement if you break any of its terms, or if your use of the Service disrupts Hostnali Webhost’s business operations or affects any other party. When a Service is terminated for breach, all of your data on that Service is removed from Hostnali Webhost’s servers.

Cancelling your account or changing your plan

You can request account cancellation or a hosting plan change at any time by submitting a cancellation request in the Client Area or by opening a support ticket. Our other contact details are on our contact page. To protect your account, we only act on requests made from your Client Area or from the email address registered on your account, and we may ask you to confirm your identity. Never send us your password. Incomplete cancellation requests cannot be processed. You remain responsible for any fees that arise because an account was not cancelled.

To avoid being billed for the next period, your cancellation request must reach us at least 15 days before your next billing date. When cancelling two or more dedicated servers within any 30-day period, the request must reach us at least 30 days before the next billing date; for ten or more dedicated servers within any 30-day period, at least 60 days before.

VPS and dedicated servers are not refundable. They are terminated as soon as the cancellation is processed, and no refund or credit is given for the unused part of the billing period.

Refunds

Refunds, including our 30-day money-back guarantee, are covered in our Refund Policy. In addition:

• VPS and dedicated servers are not refundable.
• Only one refund may be issued for each invoice.
• Domain name registrations, whether an initial registration or a renewal, cannot be cancelled and remain in effect until the end of the registration term.
• If your hosting plan includes a free domain name, you must pay a Domain Reimbursement Fee to cover the cost of the registration if, before your hosting plan subscription expires, you (a) cancel the hosting plan, (b) change to a plan or term that does not include a free domain name, or (c) transfer the domain name to another registrar. The fee depends on the domain type and the registration term.
• Hostnali Webhost may grant or deny any refund request in line with the Refund Policy.

Prohibited conduct and acceptable use

Our full rules are set out in the Acceptable Use Policy. Your use of the Service must comply at all times with the laws of South Africa and with any other laws that apply to you.

Hostnali Webhost does not allow unsolicited commercial email (“spam”) to promote products or services. Any customer who sends spam through the Hostnali Webhost network, or promotes content hosted with Hostnali Webhost through spam, is in breach of this Agreement and will be suspended immediately.

You are responsible for making sure your use of the Service does not consume excessive system or network resources or disrupt the normal use of the Service, for example by spawning multiple processes or consuming excessive memory, CPU or bandwidth. The following content and behaviour are prohibited (this list is not exhaustive):

1. Content that contains, or links to, nudity, pornography, adult content, or sexual or foul language.
2. Content that condones, promotes, contains or links to warez, cracks, hacks, their associated utilities, or other piracy-related information, whether for educational purposes or not.
3. Content that has been promoted through spam or mail fraud schemes, or pages that promote or condone spam. Bulk email sent from our servers to unknown recipients soliciting products or services, or bulk email sent from elsewhere to unknown recipients soliciting products or services related to a Hostnali Webhost account, will result in immediate account suspension.
4. Content that is grossly offensive to the community, including blatant expressions of bigotry, prejudice, racism, hatred or excessive profanity, or any obscene, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable material.
5. Content that exploits children under 18 years of age in any way.
6. Content that sells or promotes products or services that are unlawful where the content is posted or received.
7. Content that infringes any copyright, patent, trademark, service mark, trade name, trade secret or other intellectual property right of any third party.
8. Content that promotes mail fraud, multi-level marketing (pyramid) schemes, or other illegal or fraudulent activities.
9. Content that posts or discloses personal or private information about any third party without their express consent.
10. Reverse engineering, decompiling or otherwise deriving the source code, structure or sequence of any Hostnali Webhost service, solution or technology.

Unacceptable resource usage

You may not:

1. Use 25% or more of our system resources for longer than 90 seconds at a time. Activities that can cause this include, but are not limited to, CGI scripts, FTP, PHP and HTTP.
2. Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes on a shared server at any time, including daemons such as IRCd.
3. Run any web spider or indexer on shared servers.
4. Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
5. Run any BitTorrent application, tracker or client. You may link to legal torrents hosted elsewhere, but you may not host or store them on our shared servers.
6. Take part in any file-sharing or peer-to-peer activity.
7. Run any game servers.
8. Run cron jobs at intervals of less than 15 minutes.
9. Run any MySQL query that takes longer than 15 seconds. MySQL tables should be indexed appropriately.

Reservation of rights

Hostnali Webhost reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to:

1. Remove or disable access to any website hosted on its servers that it considers inappropriate.
2. Review any account for excessive disk space or bandwidth use, and suspend service to accounts that exceed the allowed levels.
3. Terminate any account for non-payment of fees, or for providing fraudulent account or payment information.
4. Terminate any account whose website content results in, or is the subject of, legal action or threatened legal action against Hostnali Webhost or any of its affiliates or partners, whether or not that action is eventually found to have merit.
5. Terminate any account for unsolicited commercial email (spam), illegal access to other computers or networks (hacking), distribution of viruses or similar destructive activity, any activity, lawful or not, that Hostnali Webhost determines to be harmful to its other customers, operations or reputation, or any breach of this Agreement.
6. Suspend the Service at any time, for any length of time, when necessary, without penalty or liability.

You agree that it may be necessary for us to suspend the Service temporarily for technical reasons or to maintain network equipment or facilities.

Customer conduct

We have zero tolerance for abusive language or abusive behaviour towards our company, our services or our employees. Any customer whom we find, at our sole discretion, to be abusive towards our company, our services or our employees may have their account terminated immediately and without a refund.

We respect all of our clients and will do everything we reasonably can to keep you satisfied. If you are ever unhappy with our service, please raise the issue with our support team through a support ticket first, so that we have the chance to put it right.

Backups

Automated daily backups of your hosting account’s files, databases and email are included with all shared, reseller and corporate hosting plans. You can restore from them yourself in your control panel, or ask our support team to help. Backups are kept for a limited period and are provided to help you recover from accidents; they are not a guarantee against all data loss. We recommend that you also keep your own copies of important data off the server, which you can create and download from your control panel.

VPS and dedicated servers do not include backups unless a backup service is added to your order.

Uptime guarantee (Service Level Guarantee)

Hostnali Webhost guarantees 99.99% monthly uptime for its hosting services: shared, WordPress, reseller, corporate and email hosting, VPS and dedicated servers. Uptime means that our servers and network are available and responding. It is monitored around the clock, and the current status is published at status.hostnali.co.ke. This section is a Service Level Guarantee as defined above.

If monthly uptime for your service falls below the guarantee, you may claim a service credit, calculated as a percentage of that month’s hosting fee (for plans billed yearly or longer, the fee divided by the number of months in the billing period):

• How to claim. Open a support ticket from your Client Area within 30 days of the end of the month concerned, giving the service and the dates and times of the downtime. Credits are verified against our monitoring records.
• How credits are given. Approved credits are added to your Client Area account balance and used against your next invoice. Credits are not paid out in cash, cannot be transferred and are capped at 100% of that month’s hosting fee for the affected service.
• What is not covered. Downtime caused by: planned maintenance announced in advance; your own website code, applications, plugins, themes or configuration changes; for self-managed VPS and dedicated servers, the operating system and software you manage; exceeding your plan’s resources or a breach of these terms; suspension for non-payment or abuse; attacks such as denial-of-service attacks; third-party services you use (for example external email providers, DNS hosted elsewhere or your internet provider); domain name issues; and events outside our reasonable control.
• Sole remedy. The service credits in this section are your only remedy for downtime of the hosting services.

Downloadable modules, plugins, themes and software

Modules, plugins, themes and software are provided “as is”, without any warranty, express or implied, as to their features, functionality, performance or integrity, including anything stated in the product descriptions.

Indemnification

You agree to protect, indemnify and hold harmless Hostnali Webhost, its agents, customers, officers, employees, shareholders, directors and administrators from all liabilities, losses, expenses and claims, including reasonable legal fees, that arise from any service provided or performed (or agreed to be performed) or any product sold by you, your agents, employees, officers, shareholders, directors or assigns. In particular, you agree to defend, indemnify and hold Hostnali Webhost harmless against liabilities arising from:

1. any injury to a person or property caused by any product sold or distributed in connection with Hostnali Webhost’s Services;
2. any material you provide that infringes, or allegedly infringes, the proprietary rights of a third party; and
3. any copyright, trademark, patent or other intellectual property violation, and any defective product sold to a customer through Hostnali Webhost’s Services.

Disclaimer

EXCEPT FOR THE SERVICE CREDITS SET OUT UNDER “UPTIME GUARANTEE” ABOVE, AND TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, HOSTNALI WEBHOST WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGES YOUR BUSINESS MAY SUFFER, AND MAKES NO WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, FOR THE SERVICES IT PROVIDES. HOSTNALI WEBHOST DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THIS INCLUDES LOSS OF DATA RESULTING FROM DELAYS, NON-DELIVERIES, DOMAIN ISSUES, FAILED BACKUPS, FAILED HARDWARE, MIS-DELIVERIES, AND ANY AND ALL SERVICE INTERRUPTIONS CAUSED BY HOSTNALI WEBHOST, ITS EMPLOYEES, DATA CENTRES OR CONTRACTORS. NOTHING IN THIS AGREEMENT LIMITS ANY RIGHT YOU HAVE THAT CANNOT BE LIMITED BY LAW.

Hostnali Webhost may amend or update these policies at any time; the current version is always published on this page. Failure to follow any of these terms and conditions may result in your account being deactivated or terminated without notice.

Hostnali Webhost expects customers who provide internet services to others to comply fully with all applicable laws on the privacy of online communications. A customer’s failure to comply with those laws is a breach of this policy. By accepting our Services, you indemnify Hostnali Webhost against any violation of law or of Hostnali Webhost policy by you that results in loss to Hostnali Webhost or in a claim against Hostnali Webhost. This means that if Hostnali Webhost is sued because of your activities that violate any law or this policy, you will pay any damages awarded against Hostnali Webhost, plus costs and reasonable legal fees.

Governing law

This Agreement, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with it or the Services, is governed by the laws of the Republic of Kenya, whichever Hostnali website you ordered from. The courts of Kenya have exclusive jurisdiction to settle any such dispute or claim. This does not remove any right you have under the mandatory consumer protection laws of the country where you live, where those laws apply to you.