Acceptable Use Policy

This document was last modified on October 1, 2020.

1. General

Web Hosting Canada (hereinafter “WHC“) employs an Acceptable Use Policy (hereinafter “AUP“) to maintain the integrity and performance of its computer equipment. In a shared web hosting environment, several clients must share limited infrastructure resources. As such, it is important not to use your hosting account in a way that may negatively affect other WHC clients. Our AUP describes what is and is not allowed on our servers. By using any of our services, you agree to comply with our AUP. Failure to comply with the AUP may result in account suspension or termination without prior notice. WHC will remain the sole arbiter in what constitutes a breach of our AUP.

2. Illegal Activities

You may not use any of WHC’s services for illegal purposes. You agree to comply with any applicable local, provincial, federal and international laws, government rules or requirements. You agree you will not be entitled to a refund of any fees paid to WHC if, for any reason, WHC takes corrective action with respect to your improper or illegal use of its services.

WHC reserves the right at all times to disclose any information as WHC deems necessary to satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, or to edit, refuse to post or to remove any information or materials, in whole or in part, in WHC’s sole discretion. For our complete privacy policy, please consult at https://whc.ca/legal/privacy-policy.

3. Spam Policy

WHC has a zero-tolerance spam policy. It is forbidden to send unsolicited mail from or to our servers under any circumstance. Penalties amounting to a minimum of 150.00$, plus taxes, can be charged for a first offence, and penalties double for repeat offenders.

4. Email Delivery

(a) Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting or reseller accounts are not designed to be used to send out large quantities of emails simultaneously. There is a limit of how many emails you can send per hour, per account. The number of emails per hour varies based on the plan you select, as described on the WHC website. Emails sent beyond the authorized limit will not be delivered. Mailing lists can have a maximum of 500 recipients. If you do send more than 25 emails at any given time, you must activate a “throttling” feature in your mailing application when sending, so that every delivery is delayed by a minimum of 10 seconds so as not to overcharge the server. You may not attempt to circumvent this limit by linking multiple hosting accounts together. If you would like to send larger quantities of legitimate commercial emails, please inquire with our sales team about our commercial Email Marketing service.

You may not send emails with attachments greater than 20 MB from Shared hosting accounts. If you need to share larger files, you are encouraged to upload your files on your hosting account and email a hyperlink (“URL”) to the file.

Each mail box must not exceed 2GB in total size. Clients are encouraged to download or archive their emails on a regular basis using software such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, or Thunderbird using the POP3 protocol, and deleting read emails from the server.

(b) Dedicated Servers and VPS

There is no fixed email delivery limit; however, a $150 administrative fee will be charged to your account if your public IP address gets listed in a public “blacklist” and we need to actively intervene in order to get it de-listed.

5. Backups

(a) Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting accounts may not use their disk space for backup storage, or storage of any files not directly linked from their web sites. You may store a maximum of 1 backup of your web hosting account on the server at any given time, and for a period not exceeding 24 hours. Please do not make backup copies of your backups.

If needed, backup copies can be generated by the Client during off-peak hours, from midnight to 5AM EST. It is strictly forbidden to generate backups of your account between 5AM and 11:59PM EST, as this can seriously degrade the system’s performance. This applies to backups generated from the cPanel, or any other type of automated backup such as those performed by third-party services and automated plugins.

WHC regularly backs up most Shared hosting accounts on its servers, as described on the WHC Web Site. Due to the resource-intensive nature of the backup process, WHC cannot guarantee the regular and consistent back up and/or restore of accounts that exceed 20 giga-bytes (“GB”) of total data or more than 200,000 files (including emails, databases, regular files, statistics, and configuration files). Accounts that store more than 20 GB of data or more than 200,000 files risk no longer being backed up automatically. Manual backups will still be possible in most situations. To re-activate automatic backups, the Client must bring the total amount of data stored on their account to less than 20 GB of data and less than 200,000 files and contact our support department. Files exceeding 1 GB will not be included in the regular backups.

(b) Dedicated Servers and VPS

Dedicated server clients are responsible for backing up their own data. Upon request, a managed backup service can be provided at additional cost.

6. Resource Usage

(a) Shared Web Hosting

In order to guarantee reliable service, Shared Hosting Accounts may not use more resources than what would be required by a regular web site in the course of its regular activities. Accounts may not use more than 5% of the total WHC system resources for a period longer than 60 seconds. This includes CPU cycles, RAM usage, disk space, and bandwidth. Accounts found to be exceeding the allowed resource usage may be suspended without prior notice in order to prevent serious service degradation. WHC will attempt to notify the client whenever possible and work with them to resolve any resource usage problem. Often, these types of problems may be resolved by repairing a faulty script, disabling a resource-intensive application, or banning malicious IP addresses from your account. Clients consistently using excessive resources may be required to transfer their account on a separate dedicated or private server, where resource usage limits are not imposed.

WHC server resources cannot be used for any other purpose than to serve data from your web sites. Under no circumstance can the server resources be resold, or used for data processing outside of the context of serving web pages or other web-accessible content to your site’s visitors.

Please note that a shared hosting environment is not intended for extremely resource-intensive sites. In these cases, custom dedicated server solutions or virtual private servers are recommended.

(b) Dedicated Servers and VPS

Dedicated servers are permitted to use the full resources available on their machine.

7. Disk Space Usage

(a) Shared Web Hosting

While we don't impose fixed disk space limits, in order to protect our clients from users consuming an excessive amount of resources, we have established the following rules concerning the use of disk space on Shared Hosting accounts:

• You may not use your web hosting space to store files that are not directly related to your web site, and that are not linked to directly from at least one section of your web site.
• You may not store more than 5,000 immediate files in any given folder (or directory), or more than the total files (inodes) allowed by your hosting account, as follows:
  • Starter web hosting: 100,000 inodes
  • Pro web hosting: 200,000 inodes
  • Enterprise web hosting: 300,000 inodes
• You may not sell or offer free disk storage on our servers to third parties, outside of the context of our Reseller services.
• You may not increase your actual disk space usage by more than 10 GB in a 24-hour period without prior written notice.

(b) Dedicated Servers

Clients are permitted to use the full hard drive space available on their machine.

(c) Cloud Servers

Cloud servers can not contain more than 1,000,000 inodes in order to ensure system stability and performance. If you require more than 1,000,000 inodes, please consider purchasing a Dedicated Server by contacting WHC.

8. Processes

(a) Shared Web Hosting

All processes invoked by the web server, cron, shell or other should not exceed the following limits:

• Open more than 64 files simultaneously;
• Create core dumps;
• Be executed continuously as a background process;
• Execute more than 5 threads or sub-processes simultaneously;
• Execute more than 5 consecutive URL rewrite rules.
• Be executed for a period longer than 60 consecutive seconds

(b) Dedicated Servers

Dedicated are not limited by the number of simultaneous processes they can run.

(c) Cloud Servers

May not use more than 30% of total system resources for longer than 60 continuous seconds to avoid serious service degradation.

9. Databases

(a) Shared Web Hosting

• Database users are limited to 30 simultaneous connections.
• Databases are limited to a maximum size of 1 GB and 1,000,000 records each.
• The total number of database requests should not exceed 5,000 per hour.
• Remote database access is only allowed for administrative purposes. It is forbidden to use databases hosted on WHC servers in conjunction with scripts hosted elsewhere.

(b) Dedicated Servers and VPS

There are no database limitations on Dedicated and VPS clients.

10. Allowed Software and Scripts

All software and scripts installed on your account must be free of vulnerabilities, viruses, and malware. Any software having vulnerabilities documented on the Internet is strictly forbidden on our servers. It is your responsibility to update all the installed software with the latest security patches in a timely manner. On Shared Web Hosting servers, WHC provides automatic installation tools that can also handle automatic software updates shortly after updates are released by the vendors. However, it is ultimately solely your responsibility to maintain up-to-date versions of your software on your account.

Popular web applications such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, along with their plug-ins, modules, and add-ons, are particularly vulnerable to exploits due to their popularity, so additional vigilance must be used to ensure the software is safe and up-to-date.

Insecure scripts and software may be disabled by WHC at any time without prior notice to prevent issues with the server’s security.

11. Unlawful Conduct or Improper Use

You agree not to use WHC systems for any purpose that is unlawful or prohibited by this AUP, and you agree to comply with any applicable local, provincial, federal and international laws, government rules or requirements.

WHC reserves the right to terminate services, in its sole discretion, if you are using the services, in association with spam or morally objectionable activities including, but not limited to:

1. Activities designed to defame, embarrass, harm, abuse, threaten, slander or harass third parties;
2. Transmission, distribution or storage of any material in violation of any applicable law or regulation, including Warez and any pirated content or tools;
3. Transmission, distribution or storage of any material protected by copyright, trademark, trade secret or other intellectual property right without proper authorization, and material that is obscene, defamatory, an invasion of privacy or constitutes an illegal threat, or is otherwise illegal;
4. Misrepresenting or fraudulently representing products/services;
5. Impersonating the identity of a third party;
6. Illegal access to other computers or network (i.e. hacking) and distribution of Internet viruses or similar destructive activities;
7. Violating Canadian or American export control laws for software or technical information;
8. Facilitating, aiding, or encouraging any of the above activities, whether using WHC’s network or service by itself or via a third party’s network or service;
9. Interference with a third party’s use of WHC’s network or service, or ability to connect to the Internet or provide services to Internet users.

The following uses of our servers are strictly forbidden:

1. Proxy servers;
2. Auto-surf sites;
3. IRC Servers.

12. Adult Content

Explicit or pornographic content is strictly forbidden from Shared Hosting Accounts. Legal adult content is permitted on Dedicated or VPS servers.

13. Shell Access

Shell access is disabled by default on Shared Hosting Accounts, but may be enabled by submitting a request via our helpdesk. The “find” Unix command may not be used on a directory having more than 5 levels of sub-directories.

Dedicated Servers are granted complete Shell Access.

14. Downloads

You may not offer downloads of third-party software (i.e. software, games, or tools that were not directly created by you or for which you do not have an exclusive distribution agreement) from your hosting account. These are commonly referred to as “mirror” download sites. Instead, you are encouraged to link to the vendor’s original download site.

15. Chat Software

Due to the resource-intensive nature of these programs, you may not install and use real-time chat software on Shared Hosting Accounts, unless this software was provided by us.

16. Cron Jobs

Shared Hosting Accounts: Cron jobs must not be scheduled more often than once every 10 minutes. Two or more separate Cron jobs may not be executed at the same time; a minimum of 5 minutes should separate two scheduled executions. You may not schedule a total of more than 5 cron jobs on any hosting account.

There are no cron job limitations on Dedicated Server and VPS.

17. Violation

WHC will, at its own discretion, determine what action will be taken in case of a violation of the AUP. WHC reserves the right to suspend or terminate any account found to be violating the AUP without notice and without refund of any pre-paid fees. Violation of this AUP could also subject you to criminal or civil liability.

18. Rights reserve

WHC reserves the right to modify this AUP at any time without providing prior notice. You are responsible for all use of the WHC services by yourself, your employees, agents, contractors, invitees and customers, whether such use is with or without your consent.

19. Questions and Concerns

If you would like more information about WHC’s Acceptable Use Policy, please contact us via our helpdesk. We will deploy our best efforts to assist you.

20. How to Report Abuse

Please contact [email protected] or open a ticket in our helpdesk. Please ensure you include as much information as you can to assist our investigations. Complaints will be assigned a unique ticket ID and investigated within 24 hours. We may follow up to obtain additional information. Unless we require additional information, you will not receive a reply or update from us.

21. Language

A French version of this document is available at https://whc.ca/mentions-legales/pua.

22. Severability

Should any provision of these Terms and Conditions be contrary to law, void, enforceable or illegal for any reason, such provision shall be deemed severable from the Terms and Conditions and shall not affect the validity or the enforceability of the remaining provisions.

23. Applicable Law and Jurisdiction

This Agreement and its interpretation are subject to the laws of the province of Quebec and the laws of Canada applicable therein, without giving effect to any principles of conflicts of laws. The Parties must irrevocably submit all disputes arising out of this Agreement to the courts of the District of Montreal, Province of Quebec, including disputes regarding the Agreement’s interpretation and its effects.