Acceptabe Usage Policy

1. VISUAL GRAVITY reserves the right to refuse service or cancel existing accounts for any reason at any time. In the event of an account cancellation by VISUAL GRAVITY or the customer, VISUAL GRAVITY will not issue a refund.

2. VISUAL GRAVITY reserves the right to change fees at any time.

3. VISUAL GRAVITY is not responsible for lost revenue, traffic, or data caused by server down time or failure, domain name transfers, or any other error - mechanical or human.

4. Customers of VISUAL GRAVITY are forbidden from partaking in an "abusive practice." The following is a list of current abusive practices. VISUAL GRAVITY reserves the right to add to or modify this list at any time.

   * Sending unsolicited commercial e-mail with your account. Also, a violation is incurred if any unsolicited email is reported relating to your domain with us in anyway, regardless of what SMTP (outgoing mail server) was used to transmit the message.

   * Upload, posting or reproducing in any way materials protected by copyright without the permission of the copyright holder.

Participating in an abusive practice will lead to an immediate account termination without prior notice or refund of any pre-payment.

5.) Customers of VISUAL GRAVITY are bound to all system policies not specifically listed within this agreement. A list of all policies can be found at http://www.visualgravity.com/policies/ and is also available via fax upon request. Violation of any of these system policies will result in an immediate account cancellation without refund or access to hosted files.

6.) This agreement is not assignable or transferable without the express written consent of VISUAL GRAVITY

7.) VISUAL GRAVITY's hosting services may only be used for lawful purposes. Transmission of any material in violation of any U.S. or any state regulation is prohibited. This includes but is not limited to: copyrighted material, material legally judged to be threatening or obscene, or material protected by trade secret.

The client specifically agrees to indemnify and hold harmless VISUAL GRAVITY from any claim resulting from a breach of these terms, and/or the use of the service which damages another.

Bandwidth Usage Policy

The official VISUAL GRAVITY policy is to provide enough monthly bandwidth so that any site using normal resources will be able to perform without a problem. If a site uses over it's allotment of bandwidth for its type of account, the customer will be charged an additional $3.00 per GB over over allotment per month. If a site is popular enough that is using more than its bandwidth allotment, then the customer is expected to be responsible for higher charges based on the amount of data transfer. The customer acknowledges, in advance, that he/she will be charged an additional $3.00 per GB per month if the bandwidth exceeds the allotment for the users account.

The customer will be e-mailed a notice once an additional amount is assessed to the customer account. Warnings will not be sent to notify customer that the limit has been reached or exceeded. This term and condition is non-negotiable.

Customers have the right to use their account for any type of legal data transfer including providing free image services that can be linked from the owner's account from any other service.

CGI Usage Policy

Our servers are not your testing platforms. User accounts are on high end, live server responsible for maintaining many accounts. Your server space is being provided to display your finished product to the web - NOT for testing purposes. If you are uploading a script to our server, you acknowledge that you have already tested your script elsewhere and that you know how to install the script. Any script that the on duty administrator deems to be potentially threatening to the overall performance of our web server will be terminated immediately and your account access will be locked out. When scripts are executed that are potentially harmful to the server in the long term, the offending account will be terminated immediately without a refund of any pre-paid fees. A termination includes the purging of all files. Please note the following cgi usage policies:

    * The script must use low system resources. Scripts that consume a large amount of server memory or CPU power will be subject to termination or additional fee.

    * Each user account may not use more than 1% of system resources at any given time.

    * Scripts may not interact with any server configuration or hardware. Users running scripts that interact with any server configuration or any hardware will be subject to immediate cancellation of the user account without refund.

    * The script can be used and referenced from any site on the Net (i.e. free counters, etc.); however, scripts must stay within the allowable usage of our system resources. Users using more resources than a single user account is entitled to use will be assessed additional monthly charges.

    * The script must be executed in a timely fashion. Any script that uses the processor for more than a few milliseconds is subject to removal.

    * Placing scripts in a publicly viewable directory (one without an index.* or default.* files) is a policy violation.

Any accounts with scripts found in violation of any VISUAL GRAVITY policy are subject to future scrutiny of all cgi by our system administrator. If a script is found to be harmful to the system, it will be killed immediately and the account locked until the account owners have been contacted. Malicious scripts are subject to immediate account cancellation.

Spam Policy

Due to the decentralized system of responsibility, the Internet has managed to retain a sense of "community". Even though many large, commercial entities have recently come online, most of the information on the Internet is made available through the efforts of Internet citizens around the world who have a desire to simply share information with other people.

Because the Internet is simply an interconnected set of similar networks, each entity using the Internet assumes some liability for the cost associated with traffic and storage. When the costs of storage space and transmission are all figured together, a single newsgroup posting can cost the collective Internet thousands of dollars! There are similar costs associated with the bandwidth required to transmit e-mail. Therefore, someone using e-mail or news postings for abusive purposes can create a large financial impact on the individual networks involved.

Aside from the financial costs, individuals who have fallen victim to some sort of Internet abuse have other costs including decreased effectiveness of the Internet. For example, someone besieged by SPAM e-mail (a massive bulk e-mail message to subscribers who did not indicate any desire to receive such e-mail) spends additional time downloading and responding to e-mail which was not requested in the first place. A newsgroup subscriber may see their favorite newsgroup overrun with meaningless off-topic advertisements; thus, obscuring any effective information still remaining in that newsgroup.

When a VISUAL GRAVITY customer performs one of these abusive activities, VISUAL GRAVITY pays the price as well. The additional time we spend responding to complaints could be better spent providing other services. In particularly egregious incidents, angry Internet users have been known to "mail bomb" an ISP by setting up programs to send so much e-mail that the ISP's mail server crashes thereby denying e-mail access to every customer of the ISP. Our system is robust enough to escape most of these types of activities. However, we VISUAL GRAVITY cannot escape every undesirable activity.

Because of the potential consequences of this type of activity, VISUAL GRAVITY disapproves of this type of behavior by its customers. Any VISUAL GRAVITY customer who abuses the resources of the Internet in any of the following ways will lose their access to the VISUAL GRAVITY network permanently. This includes:

1.Excessive posting of e-mail to Internet users who previously have not indicated a desire to receive such e-mail;

2.Posting messages to multiple Internet newsgroups which are not immediately relevant to the topics of the newsgroups;

3.Posting advertisements on groups that don't specifically permit advertising. (How do you know? Watch the group for a while before you post blindly. If other people are advertising openly, then you are pretty safe doing the same. Don't advertise unless you are sure.)

4.Using the VISUAL GRAVITY network for any illegal purpose.

There are literally thousands of advertising and marketing resources that are effective and are available for low or no cost. These include classifieds on every one of the thousands of malls on the Internet, registering with search engines, appropriate USENET postings. This is not to say that advertising on the Internet is not allowed. It simply means that VISUAL GRAVITY reserves the right to cancel the account of any subscriber who advertises inappropriately especially through the use of unsolicited mass mailings and spamming using USENET.

If the subject of Internet abuse is still unclear, please see one of the following URLs:

http://marketing.tenagra.com/rfc1855.html

http://www.oak-ridge.com/ibbch4p1.html

http://www.vix.com/spam/

Any subscriber who violates the SPAM policies of VISUAL GRAVITY will be charged $125.00 per hour for the time it takes to "clean up" the SPAM. This shall include but not be limited to the time required to answer mail from recipients of your SPAM and/or repair any damage to the server due to the "mail bombing" or other actions of the recipients in response to the SPAM. VISUAL GRAVITY will turn provide the name and personal information of any person found to be in violation of any laws to the appropriate state and/or federal officials for further legal action.