Our Acceptable Use Policy is a description of the types of activities that are not allowed on our network and, as such, forms part of Our Hosting Terms.
Alton SA reserves the right to request changes or disable, as necessary, any website, account, database, or any other component that does not comply with our established policies or to make any such modifications in an emergency at our sole discretion. To meet the changing needs of our customers, our business, the Internet environment and the legal landscape, this policy may be revised at any time and we encourage our customers to review this policy regularly.
If you feel you have discovered a violation of any area of this policy, please let us know by sending an email to abuse@altonsa.co.za.
1. SPAM and Unsolicited Email
Last updated: January 2013.
Sending unsolicited commercial communication (including, but not limited to email, instant messaging, SMS, chat rooms, discussion boards and newsgroups) is not permitted via Alton SA’s network.
Regardless of how the recipient’s email address was acquired, if email communication was not explicitly requested or consented to by the recipient or if the recipient would not expect to receive it as a result of an existing relationship, the communication is considered unsolicited (this applies to communication sent to both personal email addresses and company email addresses e.g. sales@companyxyz.co.za). Email communication that does not clearly originate from a consensual sender or which appears to come from a 3rd party or affiliate is considered unsolicited.
Examples of unsolicited communication:
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Purchased mailing lists, “safe lists” and harvesting of email addresses, where the users of those email addresses have not explicitly agreed to receive communication from a specified consensual sender is considered unsolicited.
Sending emails where the recipient must opt-out of receiving further emails that they didn’t originally request is considered unsolicited.
Sending a once-off invitation to receive further information, which was not explicitly requested or consented to by the recipient is considered unsolicited.
Email communication to a mailing list including addresses of unwilling recipients or a recipient who has indicated that they wish to be removed from such list, yet continues to receive unwanted emails after a reasonable period, is considered unsolicited. Mailing list operators should maintain meaningful records of recipient requests and their consent to receive said email communications. There should also be an option for the recipient to unsubscribe from receiving further email communications. When Alton SA receives a spam complaint, in order to establish if the communication was unsolicited, we may ask you to verify whether the recipient agreed to receive communications from you and if so, when and where you recorded their email address. Alton SA reserves the right to suspend or terminate the account of any user who sends out unsolicited email otherwise known as Spam with or without notice in accordance with its General Terms and Conditions. As a Alton SA customer, should you infringe this policy, you will be held liable for any costs incurred by Alton SA, both monetary and in reputation. Alton SA reserves the right to charge the customer of the account used to send any unsolicited email a clean-up fee or any charges incurred for blacklist removal. This cost of the clean-up fee is entirely at the discretion of Alton SA. The use of any other service for the purposes of sending SPAM with any reference to Alton SA services (including but not limited to mailboxes, autoresponders, and Web pages), will also be grounds for suspension/termination as described above. If your website was compromised and exploited for the purpose of sending unsolicited communications, Alton SA will be more lenient in resolving the issue. However, repeat exploitations of the same website and/or customer account would be grounds for suspension/termination.
2. Offensive Content
Last updated: May 2011.
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Alton SA does not allow any of the following content or links to such content, to be published on its Hosting Systems:
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Content of a pornographic, sexually explicit or violent nature.
“Hate” sites or content that could be reasonably considered as discriminatory in any way including by way of sex, race or age discrimination.
Content of an illegal nature (including stolen copyrighted material).
Content that is defamatory or violates a person’s privacy.
Content that involves theft, fraud, drug-trafficking, money laundering or terrorism.
Pirated software sites.
Illegal gambling sites.
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Request the customer to immediately remove such content; and/or
Require the customer to modify such content; and/or
Without notice, suspend or terminate access to any services; and/or
Without notice, delete the offending content; and/or
Notify the relevant authorities of the existence of such content (if required by law or otherwise), make any backup, archive or other copies of such material as may be required by such authorities, disclose such elements of the customer’s data as may be requested by the authorities and take such further steps as may be required by such authorities.
3. Misuse of account features
Last updated: July 2011.
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Operating any service which makes an account feature available to third parties for any use other than normal access to that account’s Web site is forbidden. Operating any service which enables or assists anonymous or abusive behaviour by third parties is forbidden. Operating any service which affects the stability or reliability of any Alton SA server or network component, impacts other users or the company negatively, or degrades quality of service is forbidden. All account features are to be used solely in order to develop and implement the Web site(s) associated with that account.
Reselling Multiple Domains on Alton SA’s Web Hosting packages to a third party is not allowed. Multiple Domains are to be used solely for the Profile Owner’s own websites.
4. Shared Systems and Resource Usage
Last updated: January 2022.
Customers hosting on our shared environment may not use any shared system provided by Alton SA in a way that interferes with the normal operation of the shared system, or that consumes a disproportionate share of the system’s resources. For example, excessive server hits, excessive bandwidth usage, excessive disk usage, inefficient scripts or database queries may compromise other users of the shared hosting environment. Alton SA is authorised to suspend a user’s account should it be found that excessive resource usage is negatively impacting on other customers of our shared hosting environment. In most cases, the examples below do not apply to Alton SA Managed Servers.
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Users may not, through a cron job, CGI script, interactive command, or any other means, initiate the following on Alton SA’s shared servers:
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Run any process that requires more than 50MB of memory space.
Run any program that requires more than 30 CPU seconds.
Run more than 10 simultaneous processes.
Send out mail to more than 500 recipients (email addresses) within one hour. 500 recipients represent one of the following: 500 recipients for one email, 500 individual emails or a combination of the two.
Send or receive, through mail, any file larger than 20MB.
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Each qualifying individual package is limited to the allocated quota as published in the product matrix.
Each individual database is allocated a maximum of 5GB disk space.
Databases may not be used for circumventing package disk allowances by storing web sites within the database.
Databases may only be used in conjunction with Alton SA hosted packages. Access to databases from outside our local network is provided strictly for site and database development.
Only 10 concurrent MySQL connections per database user are allowed.
Databases may not be used to store binary files (including but not limited to image and application files). The database needs to reference the image on the user’s site rather than actually storing the image i.e. these files should be stored within the user account and referred to in the database by using a link.
Alton SA reserves the right to require changes to databases and database usage should they have an adverse impact on a database server and/or other user databases on that server. Alton SA may move the database to a new server, or in extreme cases, Alton SA reserves the right to disable any database determined to be harming performance of a database server.
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To be used only by customers of the Web Hosting Basic package and higher.
The job must not execute more often than every two hours.
If a cron job is likely to consume excessive CPU usage, it should be given a lower CPU priority.
5. Server side processes
Last updated: January 2022.
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The installation or operation of any stand-alone, unattended server-side process (daemons) on Alton SA servers, with the exception of cron jobs as per point 4 above, is not possible. Violation of this policy will result in immediate account termination without warning. This is not applicable as long as it does not interfere with Alton SA’s ability to manage the server on our clients behalf.
This policy exists for several reasons:
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To protect the CPU and memory resources available on each server.
To protect and enhance system security by not allowing unapproved third-party programs to accept connections from the outside world.
6. Internet Abuse
Last updated: May 2011.
You may not use our network to engage in illegal, abusive, or irresponsible behaviour, including:
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Unauthorised access to or use of data, services, systems or networks, including any attempt to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of a system or network or to break security or authentication measures without express authorisation of the owner of the system or network;
Monitoring data or traffic on any network or system without the authorisation of the owner of the system or network;
Interference with service to any user, host or network including, without limitation, mail bombing, flooding, deliberate attempts to overload a system and broadcast attacks;
Use of an Internet account or computer without the owner’s authorisation;
Collecting information by deceit, including, but not limited to Internet scamming (tricking other people into releasing their passwords), password robbery, phishing, security hole scanning, and port scanning;
Use of Alton SA’s service to distribute software that covertly gathers information about a user or covertly transmits information about the user;
Any activity or conduct that is likely to result in retaliation against our network;
Any activity or conduct that is likely to be in breach of any applicable laws, codes or regulations including the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 (see ECT Act) which renders you liable to a fine or imprisonment;
Introducing intentionally or knowingly into Alton SA’s service any virus or other contaminating program or fail to use an up to date virus-scanning program on all material downloaded from the Web;
Forging email or other messages is forbidden. Trafficking in pirated software is forbidden. Port scanning or the use of similar tools is forbidden.
Use of Alton SA services to publish or otherwise disseminate information about the availability of pirated software or other material that is being made available illegally, including the publication of a list of links to such material, regardless of disclaimers, is specifically forbidden. We do not condone any illegal material or behaviour.
Compliance with the acceptable use policies of any network or system with which you connect through our service is required. If inappropriate activity is detected, all accounts of the user in question will be deactivated until the investigation is complete. Prior notification to the user is not assured. In extreme cases, law enforcement will be contacted regarding the activity.
7. Security
Last updated: May 2011.
Alton SA customers must take reasonable security precautions. Negligence could result in the hacking of websites as well as compromised mailboxes due to vulnerable PCs, website software or the use of weak passwords, which could affect other Alton SA customers through blacklisting, phishing or spamming.
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It is the customer’s responsibility to ensure that scripts/programs installed under their account are secure (using the latest version) and permissions of directories are set properly, regardless of installation method. 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 customers use a secure password. If a password is found to be weak, Alton SA will notify the user and allow time for the user to change/update the password. Failure to make a password change that inadvertently leads to the website being compromised could result in the user’s account being suspended / terminated.
Passwords should consist of at least 11 mixed alpha and numeric characters with case variations. Customers should not use a common word as a password and should change their passwords regularly. In the event of abuse Alton SA reserves the right to reset a password.
8. Disk usage
Last updated: January 2022.
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Accounts with many files can have an adverse effect on server performance. Alton SA has the following limit: 200 000 files (i.e. an email, webpage, image file, directory etc.), or 50 000 files per directory. Accounts exceeding the above limit will have those files and/or directories excluded from our backup system.
Using our servers as a personal storage facility is not permitted. Any content stored must be directly related to the website(s) in question.
Mailboxes that build up large volumes of email without being accessed are not allowed (e.g. catchall mailboxes or bounce message mailboxes). The primary cause of excessive disk usage can be due to customers having their catchall address enabled, yet never checking their primary account mailbox. Over time, tens of thousands of messages build up, pushing the account past our file limit.
Email older than five years may not be stored on the server.
Individual emails that are 5 MB or larger may not be stored on the server for more than 1 month.
Alton SA has a disk usage quota in place for its Web Hosting packages. Please consult with our technical team as to the the package that you are on.
In order for Alton SA to operate with greater efficiencies and for our customers to have the flexibility and control of actively managing their disk space, we will ntify you when the package space is exceeded.
Managed Server disks running at near full capacity poses a serious risk to the stability and ongoing operation of the servers. Our internal automated monitoring system alerts us to such instances. We will notify you once we receive these alerts and provide guidance on what approach to take to remedy the situation. Alton SA will stop sending escalations to the customer and deactivate alerts, on the server in question, after three notifications have been sent and if there is a lack of evidence that steps have been taken by the customer to free up adequate disk space. This means, after three notifications, you will not continue to be notified that the server’s disk space has reached full capacity. More importantly, your website and/or email will become unresponsive once your disk is full.
9. Traffic Usage
Last updated: November 2020.
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Using our Web Hosting packages and Volume Plan primarily for online file storage, archiving electronic files or streaming excessive video or hosting music is not permitted.
Certain services may not be hosted on our Server and Colocation offering without prior consultation. Examples include, but are not limited to:
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Public mirroring services that are made available for general public use
Any website or service where the primary focus is to drive or redirect traffic from one network to another
Reselling bandwidth and/or network capacity as internet access to end-users
If you’d like to discuss your requirement in more detail, please contact us.
10. Combining traffic quotas across multiple servers is not supported
Last updated: November 2020.
Alton SA will provide traffic usage per IP address and any excessive usage will be flagged with the customer. It is, therefore, not possible to apply an aggregated traffic usage model across multiple servers.
Examples that may generate high traffic are:
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Very popular Websites (eg. news24.com)
Large SaaS implementations
Servers used for mass download purposes or caching proxies
Mass mail services (eg. a free Webmail service)
Shared hosting
Cloud hosting platforms
We have found that the majority of our customers remain well within the acceptable aggregated data usage pattern. We will contact any customers that show a pattern of excessive usage, to discuss a feasible solution. Should you have any concerns, you’re welcome to contact us .
11. Traffic & Self-Managed Servers
Last updated: November 2020
Alton SA monitors the total upload and download volume of customers to identify those with disproportionate usage. Our Acceptable Use Policy restricts only the speed of access, it does not limit the time connected to the internet through broadband, nor does it reduce the overall download and/or upload volume of any customer.
Alton SA will not be liable to you or any other third party for any loss or damages suffered, arising from, or in any way relating to, the restriction of access of speed as a consequence of exercising its Acceptable Use Policy.