Terms of Service

Left Brain Hosting provides web hosting services to subscribers around the world. The servers are located in the Central US area, our main focus is to serve our US based clients. The following terms of service are designed to provide the highest level of service available.

Content

All services provided by Left Brain Hosting are to be used for lawful purposes only. Transmission, storage or presentation of any information, data or material in violation of any United States Federal, State or Local law is prohibited. This includes but is not limited to: copyrighted material, material we judge to be threatening or obscene, material that jeopardizes national security or material protected by trade secret or other laws. The subscriber agrees to indemnify and hold harmless Left Brain Hosting from any claims resulting from the subscriber's use of Left Brain Hosting's services which damages the subscriber or any other party.

Note: Pornography and sex related merchandising are prohibited on any Left Brain Hosting shared account. This includes sites that may imply sexual content or link to adult content elsewhere. This is also true for sites that promote any illegal activity or content that may be damaging to Left Brain Hosting servers or any other server on the Internet. Links to such materials are also prohibited.

Examples of prohibited content or links include (but are not limited to):

• IRC Software
• Pirated software
• Hacking sites, programs or archives
• Warez Sites
• Distribution of music files or any other material in which the account holder does not own the copyright.
• Adult Sites
• Game Servers (dedicated game server programs)

Left Brain Hosting will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of this provision. Content that does not meet these standards will be removed without prior notice to the subscriber.

Housing of any of the following files is considered a violation of the terms of service:

IRC - We currently do not allow IRC, Egg Drops, BNC, or IRC bots to be operated on our servers or network. Files with references to IRC or any likeness thereof are prohibited. Also any program that acts like an IRC server or that provide chat functions that run as background processes are not allowed.

Proxies - We do not allow proxy servers of any kind, whether for personal or business use. Files with references to any proxy or likeness thereof are prohibited.

PortScanning - We do not allow any kind of portscanning to be done on or from our servers or network.

Commercial Advertising - Email

• High volume email deployments of any type are not permitted with any Left Brain Hosting shared account.
• Spamming, i.e. the sending of unsolicited email, from any Left Brain Hosting server or any server located on the Left Brain Hosting network is STRICTLY prohibited. Left Brain Hosting will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of this provision. This also includes Optin Optout mail programs and mail that either directly or indirectly references a domain contained within an account at Left Brain Hosting.
• Running Unconfirmed Mailing Lists. Subscribing email addresses to any mailing list without the express and verifiable permission of the email address owner is prohibited. All mailing lists run by Left Brain Hosting customers must be Closed-loop ("Confirmed Opt-in"). The subscription confirmation message received from each address owner must be kept on file for the duration of the existence of the mailing list. Purchasing or selling lists of email addresses from 3rd parties for mailing to or from any Left Brain Hosting hosted domain, or referencing any Left Brain Hosting account, is prohibited.
• Advertising, transmitting, or otherwise making available any software, program, product, or service that is designed to violate this TOS or the TOSof any other Internet Service Provider, which includes, but is not limited to, the facilitation of the means to send Unsolicited Bulk Email, initiation of pinging, flooding, mail-bombing, text-bombing, unsolicited bulk text messaging or denial of service attacks is prohibited.
• Email address cultivating, or any unauthorized collecting of email addresses without prior notification of the email address owner is strictly prohibited.
• Operating an account on behalf of, or in connection with, or reselling any service to, persons or firms listed in the Spamhaus Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database at www.spamhaus.org is prohibited.

ShoutCast Servers - We do not allow Shoutcast Servers due to bandwidth and load issues.

Background Running Programs - We ask that users request permission before enabling persistent background processes of substantial load.

PHP Shell - PHP Shells or any likeness thereof are prohibited. Files with any reference to PHP Shells or likeness thereof are prohibited.

Server Abuse - Any attempts to undermine or cause harm to a Left Brain Hosting server or subscriber of Left Brain Hosting is strictly prohibited including, but not limited to:

• Logging into a server or account that you are not authorized to access
• Accessing data or taking any action to obtain services not intended for you or your use
• Attempting to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of any system, subsystem or network
• Tampering, hacking, modifying, or otherwise corrupting or breaching security or authentication measures without proper authorization
• Transmitting material that contains viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time bombs, cancelbots or other computer programming routines or engines with the intent or effect of damaging, destroying, disrupting or otherwise impairing a computer's functionality or the operation of the System
• Interfering with, intercepting or expropriating any system, data or information
• Interfering with service to any user, host or network including, without limitation, by means of overloading, "flooding," "mailbombing," or "crashing" any computer system

Hacked accounts - Each customer is fully responsible of his webspace content, regardless if the content was placed on his server space legally or as a result of a succesful hacking attempt. We offer our commercial services to recover upon succesful hacking, to remove the results of hacks and to audit your site security wise, harden your webspace's security, but is the customer's responsability to request these services (or similar services by third party providers). If no action is taken within 24 hours the Left Brain Hosting team announces the account owner about the eventuality to being hacked, the account will be suspended.

You will be held responsible for all actions performed by your account whether it be done by you or by others.

Outdated software versions

Phasing out the support for PHP versions prior 7.*

The active support by the PHP project for PHP 5.6, the final release series of PHP 5, ended at 31th December.
PHP 5.6.30, due in early January 2017, will be the final release of PHP 5.6 that contains regular bug fixes. After PHP 5.6.30 and until December 31, 2018, only critical security issues will still be fixed for PHP 5.6 and releases will be made on an as-needed basis. Users of PHP 5 should upgrade to PHP 7 as soon as possible, as they may be exposed to unpatched security vulnerabilities after December 31, 2018 when PHP 5 reaches its End of Life.
Most of latest version of content managing systems (Joomla 3.6, Wordpress 4.7.1) are fully supporting the latest PHP 7.* versions, but both might have add-ons having problems running under the last PHP version.
Older versions generally are written to use PHP 5.* versions, and might not work correctly under the latest PHP. Some ancient versions (Like Joomla 1.0.* and 1.5.*, Wordpress 3.4 and earlier) are not working at all.
To address the above issues, and to protect the interests of our clients, we have implemented couple of fixes, tweaks to the server settings and updated out support policies as follows.
We have implemented on the server a multiPHP environment to allow using the unsupported versions (namely 5.5 and 5.6) of PHP to let you have your sites up and running, even if they are not using the latest versions of your CMS.
We will retire this support at the end of the year, you should upgrade your sites since then to be able to work on the latest PHP version. After that date server wide only use of the latest PHP 7.* will be allowed.
If during this year a site will be hacked and taked down, will be released only after is cleaned  from malware (as was the basic rule) AND will be patched/upgraded to run under PHP 7.*.

Outdated CMS core versions

For the new accounts we don't allow installing or using anything else, but the latest versions of CMS-es.

For existing accounts the outdated CMS-es need to be upgraded to the latest version. If and account hosts a CMS wich is one major version older, than the last version available (for example hosts Joomla 3.5 when the active version is 3.6) and the site is hacked, and suspended for that, according to the present ToS, the account will be reinstantiated ONLY after the CMS used is upgraded to the latest available version.

The hosting contracts which are hosting outdated software with known security rules, or not supporting the latest version of PHP, MySQL or Apache installed on the server, the service contracts will be ended when the contracted terms are expired.

Owner of accounts in the situations described above will be notified with at least one month prior the deadlines.

Password Security and Account Authorization

Left Brain Hosting provides customers flexibility over their own passwords, account access and authorization procedures. Customers are responsible for selecting the appropriate authentication procedures and selecting the proper information which will be used to authenticate the account. It is the responsibility of the customer to protect the information used to authenticate their account. Account access, password security and server security are the responsibility of the customer. Left Brain Hosting will not be liable for any damages, direct or indirect, that result from unauthorized account access, password compromise or hacking.

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Technical Support

Left Brain Hosting Support includes access to technical support provided via knowledgebase, ticket system, email and livechat.

Left Brain Hosting's technical support is strictly limited to the direct customer of Left Brain Hosting and not to in-direct client. For example, a client of the Left Brain Hosting Customer is not entitled to Support from Left Brain Hosting and should at no time be given Account Access, Passwords, or Passphrases belonging to Left Brain Hosting's customer accounts. If you need to assign more people to be in touch our team, you can add additional Profiles in your account area. It is the obligation of the Left Brain Hosting customer to ensure compliance with this policy.

Scheduled Maintenance and Downtime

Left Brain Hosting will use its commercially reasonably efforts to provide services 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Subscriber acknowledges that from time to time the services may be inaccessible or inoperable for various reasons, including periodic maintenance procedures or upgrades ("Scheduled Downtime"); or service malfunctions, and causes beyond Left Brain Hosting's control or which are not reasonably foreseeable by Left Brain Hosting, including the interruption or failure of telecommunications or digital transmission links, hostile network attacks, or network congestion or other failures. Left Brain Hosting will provide at least 48 hours advance notice to the subscriber for Scheduled Downtimes, and will use commercially reasonable efforts to minimize any other disruption, inaccessibility and/or inoperability of its web servers. Left Brain Hosting has no responsibility for downtime resulting from a user's actions. Also, the 100% network uptime guarantee does not apply for shared accounts.

Refunds

Refunds will be posted for FULL months only. Notice of cancellation must be given before the month in question begins. Setup fee is NON refundable.

Any violation of Left Brain Hosting's Terms of Service Agreement shall result in no refund.

Promotional Use

Left Brain Hosting may refer to You, Your company, or your logo's for promotional purposes. Your company name, logos and the services that were provided to the customer by Left Brain Hosting may be used in promotional materials, advertising, marketing releases, newsletter, public disclosures and on the Left Brain Hosting website. This reference will be strictly limited to disclosure that Left Brain Hosting has provided services to the company and will not contain any confidential, sensitive or proprietary information in such a reference. The reference will also not provide any personally identifiable information about the individual or technical information regarding the server configuration and design used by the customer at Left Brain Hosting. However, Left Brain Hosting may disclose any information requested by law enforcement or when compelled by court order, applicable laws or regulations.

Limitations on Use

• Any account using 15% or more of the server CPU or memory can be suspended and/or terminated.
• Any account that uses excessive amounts of bandwidth can and will be subjected to bandwidth throttling.
• Unauthorized background processes shall result in immediate termination of the account. Left Brain Hosting maintains the right to cancel accounts at its discretion.

Account Setup, Termination, and Billing:

The account will be charged on the day the order is processed, regardless of the account billing date. The account will not be charged again until the next month's billing cycle. Billing dates are recurring on the day the account was opened.

Check Orders: Payment by check is available only upon initial acceptance by Left Brain Hosting. Please contact billing@leftbrainhosting.net for details. Accounts for subscribers who wish to pay by check will be setup when the check is received by Left Brain Hosting

EVENT OF DEFAULT BY CUSTOMER (Disabling of accounts due to overdue payment). If the CUSTOMER fails to pay an invoice within 14 days of the date of that invoice, Left Brain Hosting reserves the right to disconnect service without further warning. If services are disconnected for non payment, customer must pay all past due charges up to the day of service disconnection in order to reconnect service. If your account has been disabled for non payment, you may be charged a reconnection fee of up to $50 in order to re-enable your account.

You will receive a reminder e-mail with 2 days before each invoice's due data. When the due date is passed, you will receive 2 more remiders in the next 7 days. You must do the payment  in this time, or contact us to clarify your situation. If you failed to do the payment, or you failed to obtain from our staff new due date,  after 7 days of the original due date of the last invoice the account will be suspended, but will be released if the payment is received in 30 days from the original due date. There is only one negociation accepted, a due date once postponed remains unchangeable. Late fees might apply!!

If in the 30 days after the due date passed we will not receive the payment, the account will be deleted, and all your data will be lost.

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Left Brain Hosting’s remedy upon default - TERMINATION.

In addition to all rights and remedies granted to Left Brain Hosting in this Terms of Service Agreement (including, but not limited to, the right to charge and collect late charges), upon the occurrence of an event of default, Left Brain Hosting shall have the right (a) to cease providing the services to customer without notice to customer, (b) upon not less than one (1) business days written notice to customer, to terminate the hosting services, all at customer’s cost and expense. Upon such termination, customer agrees to and shall immediately pay to Left Brain Hosting all fees and other amounts due and owing for services provided through and including the effective date of termination.

Cancellation Procedure:

Valid proof of account ownership will be required to terminate an account. This includes, but is not limited to, the billing password or an account passphrase created by customers. Non-secure information, such as the contact email address or account billing address, is not sufficient as a security verification. The month-to-month agreement for services is automatically renewed each month in perpetuity subject to written cancellation via help desk ticket or email sent to billing@leftbrainhosting.net (email subject to valid proof of account ownership). Left Brain Hosting is not able to schedule cancellation requests. Customer is responsible for any fees incur for Services to customer if no formal cancellation request is submitted.

Parked Domain Names: There is a one-time fee of $15 for parking additional domain names above the ones included in the package choosen. This fee is nonrefundable.

Add-on Domain Names: Additional domains that point to a sub folder (Virtual Domains) are $5 per domain per month. This is a nonrefundable fee.

Domain Name Transfers: Left Brain Hosting shall not be held responsible for domain transfers. The account holder is responsible for completing any necessary domain name transfers. We provide the tools and support for the process, but the final responsibility is the account holder's.

Payment for subsequent certificate renewal is the sole responsibility of the customer and must be made in advance prior to certificate renewal. Please contact billing@leftbrainhosting.net for renewal requests.

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Courtesy Services for Customers

All services such as backup and cPanel are provided for the courtesy of the subscriber. It is the sole responsibility of the subscriber to maintain the subscriber's own backup of any data. Left Brain Hosting is not responsible for lost data or for lost data due to third party software that is not maintained by Left Brain Hosting programming staff. (cPanel is not associated with Left Brain Hosting.)

Clam Antivirus is installed and available for each account, we recommend using it regularly - can found and neutralize most common malware.

The Optimize Website cPanel applet can help you save lot of bandwith by compressing the content withouth need of additional tools - letting you gain in speed too.

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Limitation of Damages or Liability

EXCEPT AS DESCRIBED IN THE INDIVIDUAL CONTRACTS, LEFT BRAIN HOSTING SHALL NOT BE LIABLE TO CUSTOMER FOR HARM CAUSED BY OR RELATED TO CUSTOMER'S SERVICES OR INABILITY TO UTILIZE THE SERVICES UNLESS CAUSED BY WILLFUL MISCONDUCT. LEFT BRAIN HOSTING SHALL NOT BE LIABLE TO CUSTOMER FOR LOST PROFITS, INDIRECT, SPECIAL OR INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES. NOTHWITHSTANDING ANYTHING ELSE IN THIS TERMS OF SERVICE AGREEMENT, THE MAXIMUM AGGREGATE LIABILITY OF LEFT BRAIN HOSTING AND ANY OF ITS EMPLOYEES, AGENTS OR AFFILIATES, UNDER ANY THEORY OF LAW SHOULD NOT EXCEED THE AMOUNT OF FEES IT HAS COLLECTED ON THE ACCOUNT. EXCEPT AS OTHERWISE PROVIDED IN THIS TERMS OF SERVICE AGREEMENT, LEFT BRAIN HOSTING PROVIDES ALL PRODUCTS AND SERVICES "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, OR IMPLIED AND DISCLAIMS ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. CUSTOMER SHALL BE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SELECTION, USE, AND SUITABILITY OF ANY PRODUCT AND SERVICE AND LEFT BRAIN HOSTING SHALL HAVE NO LIABILITY ASSOCIATED WITH THE FOREGOING. CUSTOMERS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ENSURING SECURITY OF SERVERS.

General

Terms Of Service are subject to change without any prior notification.

This Terms of Service Agreement is a legally binding contract between the subscriber (customer)and Left Brain Hosting.

By opening an account, the subscriber agrees to the above-stated terms.

Anything not listed in the Terms of Service Agreement is open to interpretation and change by Left Brain Hosting administrators without prior notice.

All prices, with the exception of the ones expressly mentioned, are nonrefundable and nonnegotiable after the signup for services has been accepted by both parties.

Any violation of this Terms of Service Agreement will result in termination of the account. Left Brain Hosting maintains the right to terminate accounts without prior notification.

We reserve the right to remove any account with 15 days' prior notice.