Terms Of Service
PC Concepts provides web hosting to clients worldwide, and we have a responsibility to protect each client and to provide the best services available. All clients of PC Concepts are subject to the following terms of service.
Indemnification Policy
You agree to use all PC Concepts services and facilities at your own risk. PC Concepts specifically disclaims all warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. In no event shall PC Concepts be liable for any loss of any kind (including lost profits), or loss of data, or other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Customer agrees that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold PC Concepts harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and claims, including reasonable attorney’s fees asserted against PC Concepts, 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, it’s agents, employees or assigns. Customer agrees to defend, indemnify and hold harmless PC Concepts against liabilities arising out of Any injury to person or property caused by any products sold or otherwise distributed in connection with PC Concepts server. PC Concepts reserves the right to intervene with any of the sites hosted on its servers in the interest of its customers. Any material supplied by customer infringing or allegedly infringing on the proprietary rights of a third party Copyright infringement any defective products sold to customer from PC Concepts server. PC Concepts shall be the sole judge of what violates this Policy.
You exempt and indemnify the registry/registrar from all loss relating to your registration of a domain name (CLAUSE 5)
1. Billing
At this time we bill monthly and annually, depending upon the plan. If you are not satisfied within your first 30 days we would be happy to provide you with a full refund (For some special offers the money-back-guaranteed day will be varied; and Domain Name registration fee and any addons like (Managed WordPress, Office 365) / SSL Certificates are non-refundable). We accept Visa and Mastercard. Clients are encouraged to pay by credit card as it is the easiest way to handle payment at this time. There are no contract periods but for each successive period, your contract is automatically renewed unless we are notified otherwise.
Please note we do not refund full amounts since purchase, if unsatisfied with service we refund you only for that month alone or the remainder of your annual subscription. Only web hosting is refundable. Note: We only refund to Bank Accounts and can refund Payfast transactions.
Please Note: Accounts with Proof of payment are always not guaranteed instant activation or credit, due to us having a large amount of fake proof of payments being sent. Hence billing team will do this with approval from management or until payment reflects. Please ensure you submit proof of payment earlier than due date to ensure your account stays active. We do not grant any refunds prior to 60 days for any service. This is to protect us from customers large payments to us forgetting to cancel their Paypal or EFT scheduled payments. As can be noted we are not a savings account nor bank. Customers need to ensure when they cancel that they cancel their automated payments to us. Each account has a domain set. Please note this in no way can be changed after the first week of existence, please apply for a new package if you require a new domain to be used
Free Domain Registration for some annual packages applies to the following extensions only: .co.za,.org.za,.web.za,.net.za
If paying via EFT ensure you pay us a few days before the due date and send proof of payment, so that our billing team can capture payments before due date to resolve any billing issues on your account.
Domains are auto renewed if credit exists to ensure customers do not loose domains. If you do not want to renew domains please cancel the domains or use the autorenew option. For customers paying via EFT/ Bank Transfer they could incur Cross Border Fees(As we are charged Bank Fees) if paying outside of South Africa. We hence recommend those customers pay via Credit Card/Paypal. Free Domain Renewals will only occur where an active Annual Package is active and paid up. If no Annual Package Payment exists the domain renewal is put on hold until payment is completed.
Non-Refundable Services:
- Domains Registered
- Office 365 Packages
- Managed WordPress
- SSL Certificates
- Customers that sent out RFQs faking government documents from their accounts
- Spammers/Phishing/Hackers
2 . Credits
Credits on accounts due to incorrect billing by the Billing department will be processed immediately. Credits to bank accounts can only be done 21 days from the request.
3. Amendments
You agree that PC Concepts may amend this agreement at any time without notice to you. You agree to keep advised of any changes to this agreement by checking the PC Concepts on a periodic basis on the announcement pages
4. Late Payment
All accounts are billed according to the dates they were first activated on. If you will not pay for service renewal 7 days after the service due date, your account will be suspended. If you will not pay for service renewal 90 days after the due date, your account will be auto-terminated. You will receive numerous email reminders as well as an invoice before the due date to remind you of payment, you may also receive SMS reminders if possible but is at our discretion.
PC Concepts will not be held liable for the loss or suspension of customer services due to non-payment. We recommend customers pay a few days before the due date to ensure their accounts or hosting does not get suspended or terminated.
5. Domains
Domain Purchases are non-refundable. Transfer fees are non-refundable when the domain is already transferred. If you are registering or transferring a domain name you must also agree to the Domain Name Registration Agreement. Domain name WHOIS records must be on the OWNER’s details not PC Concepts itself. Domains shall be renewed at the same price as new registrations. The current pricing is displayed on our website. Domain renewal reminders will be sent in advance of expiration via email to the address stored in your client area. Domains are ONLY auto renewed with a positive credit balance containing enough funds to renew the domain/s
After 10 days (ZA) or 29 days(International) of being expired, domains enter the redemption period. At this point, a renewal fee of R3800(.com etc.) and ZACR R800 (co.za,org.za,etc.) for local domains to renew the domain name. PC Concepts will request that you pay this cost until the 30th-day past expiration and we will try to renew it(However note paying on the last day is not recommended and is risky), after which the domain will no longer be available and may have to be re-registered when it becomes available. If Invoices are not paid on time by the due date and the domain has expired and the redemption stage passed the invoice may go into the canceled state as it will now need to be re-registered. Prices to domains can change unexpectedly at any time. We will notify customers within 24 to 48 hours of such a change Kindly note we do not register premium domains(Domains with 3 characters). If for any reason a premium domain is registered there may be an additional cost. Kindly note and ensure all your domains are renewed when and as they should be, usually you have 10 (ZA) or 30(International) days after expiry to pay before a domain goes into the redemption stage. Once the Redemption Grace Period has passed, the domain will be deleted from the Registry and is available to anyone to register as a brand new name. Please pay before(early) to ensure all goes through successfully and you do not lose your domains
If for any reason your domain is not registered, renewed or transferred correctly, PC Concepts, its directors, agents, or employees WILL UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER BE LIABLE for any reason including human error. Hence please check that your domain is registered, renewed or transferred correctly at all times. We will however do our best to assist as best we can in transferring and registration of each and every domain. Should a client contact us to transfer a domain we will not assist unless written consent from our client is provided or Form 2 of COZA (Uniforum) is done with the attached affidavit
PC Concepts shall be indemnified and held harmless by the Customer if the Customer uses any Domain Name that infringes on any rights of any person, or company.
PC Concepts does not guarantee that a Domain Name requested by a Customer will be available. Our systems may reflect that the Domain Name requested is available; however, this domain may have been already taken, as the system is reliant on server updates from both local and international WHOIS servers.
Free Domain Registration for some annual packages applies to the following extensions only: .co.za,.org.za,.web.za,.net.za
5.1 Domains / Hosting with the term GOV in it or causing any type of illegal phishing.
As spam and phishing increase many spammers are using new techniques. One that has been around for some time is pretending to send out fake RFQs and emails pretending to be part of Government departments or companies requesting services.
We will investigate and TAG and monitor domains and in no way will we allow such activities to occur using our services. The account will be suspended and funds not refunded as we get blacklisted and have to deal with complaints caused by these activities.
5.2 Domains / Hosting with loans or any lottery
At times we will require proof of establishment of financial entities to stop cybercrime. You will be required if we deem it necessary to provide this to us.
6. Marketing:
Users May choose to opt-out to any of our marketing newsletters during registration, Our client area, SMS, Email, etc.
You agree to allow us to market and provide you with new information about our services via SMS, email, Whatsapp, etc. unless you opt out via SMS or any other means.
We will adhere to the POPI Act of South Africa however if you would like us to remove you kindly contact support or disable it via your client area.
7. Resource Usage:
Users may not: Use 25% or more of system resources for longer than 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc. 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. 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(“https://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.
7.1 Excessive Usage / Websites allowed:
To ensure service levels within the Shared Hosting platform are stable and reliable, PC Concepts utilizes various methods to protect its customers and associated systems from abuse which includes, but is not limited to, the following:
Excessive SQL Databases: Services with SQL databases larger than 4GB individually, or if a database is deemed to be negatively affecting the shared hosting platform (i.e. if the database uses 200% more resources than our average database, or exceeds a reasonable RAM allocation). Excessive inode count: Services with an inode count in excess of 200 000 may result in adverse effects on server performance and is may be deemed abuse at PC Concepts discretion. You will need to upgrade to a VPS Server if necessary. Excessive domain, email and FTP services: PC Concepts does not set specified limits to the domain, email and FTP services, but at its sole discretion may suspend or deactivate a service should it adversely be impacting the performance of the Shared Hosting environment. Excessive bandwidth, email and diskio usage. We don’t monitor Website Usage for excessive usage. No Gambling sites, Lottery sites, Pornography sites, Bitcoin, Music, Movies or excessive streaming allowed as this is for web hosting and web services alone and to have fair usage and environment for all clients. We note any traffic usage above 300GB as excessive per month but only if it affects other customers by causing high diskio or network usage is used excessively.
7.2 Zero Tolerance Phishing Policy
Any account found to be hosting a phishing page will be suspended and/or terminated with or without notice at our discretion. Phishing is defined as any site that masquerades as another trustworthy site in an attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, credit card information, banking information, pin numbers, or any other personal information.
Phishing pages result in stolen identities, stolen banking information, stolen credit card information, and fraud. Due to the serious issues that phishing pages cause, phishing is not something that is taken lightly. In the event that your account is suspended for phishing, there is a very good chance that your account will not be re-enabled.
Any account suspended or terminated due to a phishing policy violation will be ineligible for a refund. We may invoice you an hourly fee of R600 per hour rounded up to the nearest hour for all time spent investigating any report that results in account suspension or termination.
7.3 Spamming
Why has my Account or Server been suspended?
As part of our agreements with you, you agree to accept the bounce back limit and to not send spam. If we suspect that you have violated our agreements with you, we will suspend your account. Whenever possible we attempt to notify you prior to suspending your account. We give a 3 strike policy we will assist in stopping the spam for you which will continue to monitor. If we find the spam to continue more than 3 times we have no choice but to suspend your server/service indefinitely to protect our other users. Below are more reasons why your account may be suspended. To resolve an issue, please contact support by submitting a Ticket. Unverified Email Addresses — We might suspend your account if your email contacts have too many unverified email addresses. If we receive bounce-back emails from these addresses, we suspect the addresses have been used for spamming. Spam Complaints — We might suspend your account because we received too many spam complaints. This means that an unacceptable number of recipients of your email campaign have actively flagged the message as spam and indicated that they either did not ask to receive the messages or that they do not know who you (the sender) is. Remember that we define spam as any message sent without the recipient’s prior consent to receive the message(s). A fine of R400 will be applied if serious bouncebacks and spam is suspected and found. We then provide one last warning. No Refunds will be given to customers found spamming even within 30-day policy.
7.4 Anti-spam / Anti-virus
We use clamd antivirus and spamassassin to SCAN all emails. Note no service provider is full proof hence we always recommend your local PCs antivirus be updated and on at all times.
Antivirus recommendations: BitDefender or ESET
7.5 Bulk Email
Why has my Account been suspended?
Bulk Emailing excessively from your account that causes shared web hosting servers to become unresponsive or slower than normal due to large amounts of account spamming via a shared hosting account is also seen as spamming or abuse on the network and will be suspended immediately.
Please refer to BULK EMAILING POLICY
8. Deleting or Closure of Accounts
Due to financial, transactions and VAT data being kept and must be kept for at least 5 years we do not delete customer accounts. We can however close accounts completely leaving them basically inactive.
Another reason is some bad actors or spammers may signup up and spam badly and then request we delete their accounts. So when we receive a warrant from law enforcement for their information they have no record. This is another valid reason we do not delete accounts.
9. Limitation Of Liability:
PC Concepts shall not be responsible for any claimed damages, including incidental and consequential damages, which may arise from PC Concepts servers going off-line or being unavailable for any reason whatsoever. Furthermore, PC Concepts shall not be responsible for any claimed damages of any kind (including lost profits), including incidental or consequential damages, resulting from the corruption or deletion of any website from one of PC Concepts servers. All damages shall be limited to the immediate termination of service.
10. Disclaimer:
PC Concepts cannot be held liable for system downtime, crashes, or data loss. We cannot be held liable for any predicted estimate of profits in which a client would have gained if their site was functioning. Certain services provided by PC Concepts are resold. Thus, certain equipment, routing, software, and programming used by PC Concepts are not directly owned or written by PC Concepts. Moreover, PC Concepts holds no responsibility for the use of our client’s accounts. If any terms or conditions are failed to be followed, the account in question will be automatically deactivated. We reserve the right to remove any account without advanced notice for any reason without restitution as PC Concepts sees fit. FURTHERMORE, PC Concepts retains the right to change any or all of the above Policies, Guidelines, and Disclaimer without notification.
Website Transfers:
END USERS: We assist with transferring your websites if under 5 websites on Cpanel/DirectAdmin infrastructure(Note this is done via queue system so we do it as we can, hence a delay in transfers)
GENERAL: PC Concepts can assist in transferring accounts from the source server to the new server but clients should confirm that all is transferred correctly and check. In no way can PC Concepts Support team be responsible if customers did not check that all was done as requested.
Overages:
Please note if you do not stay within the bounds of your plan you can receive an overage bill. We reserve the right and without notification to charge for such overages. You may query this with the support department at any time if you so choose to.
Inode Limitations:
Excessive inode count: Services with an inode count in excess of 200 000 (soft limit) may result in an adverse effect on server performance and may be deemed abuse at PC Concepts discretion – These accounts will be removed from backups – We have however set a hard limit of 2000 – 250 000 per hosting “user” account.
Accounts found to be exceeding the 200,000 inode limit will automatically be removed from our backup system to avoid over-usage. Every file (a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode. Sites that slightly exceed our inode limits are unlikely to be suspended; however, accounts that constantly create and delete large numbers of files on a regular basis, have hundreds of thousands of files, or cause file system damage may be flagged for review and/or suspension. The primary cause of excessive inodes seems to be due to users leaving their catchall address enabled, but never checking their primary account mailbox. Over time, tens of thousands of messages (or more) build-up, eventually pushing the account past our inode limit. To disable your default mailbox, login to cPanel and choose “Mail”, then “Default Address”, “Set Default Address”, and then type in: :fail: No such user here.
Loss Or Corruption Of Data:
You acknowledge and agree that PC Concepts is not and shall not be responsible or liable for any loss of any kind (including lost profits) or corruption of data that you may experience on the Services or otherwise, nor are we required to return to you any data that you have stored on the Services. This includes, without limitation, the loss or corruption of data resulting from the suspension, deletion, or modification of your web pages or the PC Concepts site, network, system, or server “crashes” or outages, or other power outages, damage caused by viruses, worms, or security breaches, file corruption, and any other cause. We recommend that you maintain backup versions of your web pages and related information to help protect yourself against such losses. We however do server backups daily and account weekly backups and have and will continue to do our utmost to protect all our client’s data to the fullest extent with all our backup software and servers.
Term/termination:
- A. This agreement shall be effective when applying for hosting services/Products from PC Concepts.
- B. You may terminate this Agreement immediately for any reason at any time by sending mail to billing[at]netconcepts.co.za.
- C. Termination by PC Concepts.
- D. When an account is canceled and terminated backups are only kept for a period of 1 week. Please contact us within 1 week if you require a backup of your canceled account.