ACCEPTABLE USAGE POLICY (AUP) and Prohibited Content

You may not publish, store or transmit through SM-Blu Digital’s services any content that SM-Blu Digital reasonably believes or can prove:

Promotes or encourages the defeat, breach or modification of copyright protection schemes. This includes but is not limited to “cracks” and “warez”.

Breaches or infringes on another person’s trademark, patent or property right. This includes the storage and publication of written media, audio works and video of which you do not own copyright.

Serves as a distribution point or source of information for copyright infringement. This includes, but is not limited to, torrent sites, torrent forums, etc.

Material purposefully set out to be malicious, fraudulent, or otherwise any content that may invoke retaliation against SM-Blu Digital by offended parties.

Material considered unfair or deceptive under the consumer protection laws of any jurisdiction, including but not limited to: chain letters, “pyramid schemes”, “ponzi schemes”, “matrix schemes”, etc.

Is otherwise illegal or solicits conduct that is illegal under laws applicable to the client or to SM-Blu Digital

Account Security

Your password is your responsibility, and you should take reasonable care and precautions to ensure that you are the only individual with access to your SM-Blu Digital services. Do not share this password with anyone. SM-Blu Digital and its employees will never ask you for your main website account password(s).

Script Security

Our services are intended for the use of production quality scripts only, and are not to be used as development platforms. Please ensure that you develop and test your own scripts locally (or on an alternate test platform) before uploading them for use on our servers.
It is your responsibility to keep all third party scripts (i.e. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.) up to date and secure at all times. Any scripts found to be vulnerable and extremely out of date may be disabled without warning or notice to protect the integrity of our servers. We reserve the right to update outdated or dangerous scripts on your site occasionally. You will be charged a reasonable service fee for these updates.

Unsolicited E-Mail/Spam

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. All email blast communications should strictly adhere to all aspects of the (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003.

You must comply with the rules of any other network you access or participate in using your SM-Blu Digital services.

Copyright Infringement Notice (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
If you believe your copyright is being infringed by a person using the SM-Blu Digital network, please send your notice of copyright infringement to our Abuse team, using the contact form found on our website.
Your notice must include the following, or it shall be ignored:
* A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed;
* Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or if multiple copyrighted words at a single site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site;
* Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit SM-Blu Digital to locate the material;
* Information reasonably sufficient to permit SM-Blu Digital to contact you, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an e- mail address;
* A statement that you have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, the copyright owners agent, or the law;
* A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Please be aware that it is illegal to file an invalid or fraudulent DMCA notice.

Disclaimer

SM-Blu Digital 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 SM-Blu Digital network.
Inquiries regarding this policy should be directed to our Abuse team, via the contact form on our website.

“Adult” or Pornographic Content
SM-Blu Digital allows the hosting of any adult or deemed “pornographic” content providing the content of which remains fully within the boundaries of all applicable laws. A dedicated IP address is required for the hosting of adult content.
In the event of any website that allows public or private user submitted content, the site owner will be held fully responsible for any content of which may breach this AUP or applicable laws. It is your duty to ensure that all content is reasonably moderated to ensure that it complies with this AUP at all times.

Server Resource Usage

All of our packages are sold with the ability for you to fully utilize the amount of disk space and bandwidth available to your relevant package.

Take note that the following are certain situations that should be monitored carefully, as they tend to lead to excessive use of resources that may push you over space or bandwidth allowances:

CPU Usage

We expect all dynamic (PHP, etc) scripts on our servers to run for no more than a maximum of 60 seconds per process. If you are connecting to external sources (such as Twitter), please ensure that you set the timeouts low enough accordingly to not breach this rule. Scripts running for longer than 60 seconds will be automatically terminated. Repeated terminations of scripts running for longer than 60 seconds may result in suspension or termination of your account. If there are scripts that absolutely must run for longer than 60 seconds, and are critical your business, please get in touch with our support team to discuss running these.
Each account should consume no more than 90 minutes of CPU time in a 24-hour period. In a decently optimized website, this should equate to approximately 500,000 hits a day. Please note that this figure is an approximation based upon our own research, and will differ on an individual case-by-case basis.

Inode Usage

To try and keep this in English, briefly summarized, each file and folder stored within your web space will utilize 1 inode. There is currently no set limit on the number of inodes available to each user, but we expect you to maintain sensible inode usage at all times. An example of bad inode usage that would result in an account being suspended or terminated would be creating tens of thousands of folders with 1 file in each. There are much more sensible methods of structuring files and folders, please use them.

MySQL Usage

As of February 1st 2010 we are implementing a maximum size restriction (“quota”) on MySQL databases across all servers. Any database that reaches or exceeds 256MB in size, will have the CREATE and INSERT MySQL permissions revoked, preventing the database from having any new content added.
If you reach this quota, you will need to take steps to reduce the size of your database (prune old data, for example) and the relevant permissions will be automatically reinstated. If you are unable to reduce the size of your database, you will have no choice but to seek additional outside hosting for either the database or site in question.

Cron/Automated Jobs

All cron/automated jobs should have intervals of no less than 15 minutes per task. Please also take into consideration the 60-second script rule for these jobs.

File Content

Your hosting account is intended for the storage and serving of website files only. Please do not use your hosting account to store local backups, music or video content from your local computer(s), as this serves only to cause our backup system(s) to store non-critical data. Backups are intended for disaster recovery purposes only and it should not be assumed that we would restore data so that you may retrieve personal backups.

High Bursts of Traffic/Activity (Digg, Reddit, Techcrunch, etc)
Whilst we don’t oversell our servers, please bear in mind that we provide shared hosting. This means that your website will be on a server that is also hosting the website(s) of many other customers. In particular situations we may be forced to suspend any sites that are receiving huge traffic from popular news or social networking sites, in order to maintain the hosting of the rest of the customers on a particular server.

Now, don’t let this alarm you too much. Historically we have survived many extremely high bursts of traffic to single sites without any problems, but depending upon the circumstances we may need to take some form of action. For example, if separate customer sites on the same server begin to receive these huge bursts of traffic, we may need to suspend these sites. Unfortunately it’s a situation that depends upon many factors that we are simply unable to list here. The main message; however, is that we will not suspend your website for receiving huge amounts of traffic so long as the server is capable of sustaining this traffic without a negative effect to the other users.

Proxy Sites or Tunneling

We do not allow the hosting or operation of proxy sites on our servers. Additionally, we do not allow our shared hosting servers to be used to proxy or tunnel traffic.

IRC Activity

All IRC activity is prohibited on our network. This includes, but is not limited to, BNC’s, IRC Servers and Eggdrop scripts.

Customer Communication

Please remember that the staff at SM-Blu Digital is, like you, only human. We expect to be treated with the same level of respect as you would expect from our staff, so please bear this in mind when communicating with us, and more importantly before clicking the “Send” button.

We reserve the right to ignore and discontinue any correspondences we consider personally
threatening, abusive or otherwise intended to invoke negative responses to the person receiving them. Legitimate and constructive criticism; however, is strongly welcomed – providing you can deliver this to us in an appropriate and sensible manner.
Abusing members of staff is absolutely not tolerated, and will result in an instant account termination.

Prohibited Scripts

The installation of third party scripts with the intention of downloading files from remote sites to store on our servers is strictly prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to; ‘TorrentFlux’, ‘RapidLeech’ and other variations.
Scripts that interact with any online services in real-time or more frequently than once every 15 minutes are prohibited from our servers. This includes Facebook applications, online games or games related scripts, Shoutboxes or any other online chat applications that refresh frequently.
“Public File sharing” scripts that allow others to upload files to our servers to be shared with others are strictly prohibited.