General Terms and Conditions
The use of services from Digital Watermelon Consulting constitutes
In this document: Digital Watermelon Consulting refers to Digital Watermelon Consulting cc, its members, employees, suppliers, associates, additional domain names used for business, subsidiaries, sister companies and other business operations.
Support
We will endeavour to provide a continuous high-quality service. If you experience problems with your service, you should consult our support team on [email protected].
We may require suspension of some of our services for short scheduled periods to carry out maintenance or repair to our services. Information concerning scheduled downtime and unplanned downtime will be emailed as a newsletter to all clients.
Website Design
Whilst every endeavour will be made to ensure that the website and any scripts or programs are free of errors, Digital Watermelon Consulting cannot accept responsibility for any losses incurred due to malfunction, the website or any part of it.
The website, graphics and any programming code remain the property of Digital Watermelon Consulting until all outstanding accounts are paid in full.
Any scripts, CGI applications, PHP, ASP.NET scripts or software (unless specifically agreed) written by Digital Watermelon Consulting remain the copyright of Digital Watermelon Consulting and may only be commercially reproduced or resold with the permission of Digital Watermelon Consulting.
Digital Watermelon Consulting cannot take responsibility for any copyright infringements caused by materials submitted by the client or used by the client in the future on their website.
We reserve the right to refuse any material of a copyrighted nature unless adequate proof is given of permission to use such material.
Any coding additions to website briefs provided will be carried out at the discretion of Digital Watermelon Consulting and may carry an additional cost. Where no charge is made by Digital Watermelon Consulting for such additions, Digital Watermelon Consulting
The client agrees to make available as soon as is reasonably possible to Digital Watermelon Consulting all materials required to complete the site to the agreed standard and within the set deadline.
Digital Watermelon Consulting will not be liable for costs incurred, compensation or loss of earnings due to the failure to meet agreed deadlines.
Digital Watermelon Consulting will not be liable or become involved in any disputes between the site owner and their clients and cannot be held responsible for any wrongdoing on the part of a site owner e.g. any disputes re content/images that have been provided to us for inclusion on the site.
Digital Watermelon Consulting will not be liable for any costs incurred, compensation or loss of earnings due to the work carried out on behalf of the client or any of the clients appointed agents.
Digital Watermelon Consulting will not be liable for any costs incurred, compensation or loss of earnings due to the unavailability of the site, its servers, software or any material provided by its agents.
In no event shall Digital Watermelon Consulting be liable for any direct, indirect, consequential, special and exemplary damages, or any damages whatsoever, stemming from the use or performance of a client website or from any information, products and services provided through client sites, even if this website has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
- In the absence of any negligence or
other breach of duty by us, your use of our client websites is entirely at your own risk. - If we are in breach of the arrangements under this agreement, we will not be responsible for any losses that you suffer as a result.
- We do not have any liability of any sort (including liability for negligence) for the acts or omissions of providers of telecommunication services or for faults in or failures of their networks and equipment.
A non-refundable deposit of 50% is required with all of our projects before any design work will be carried out.
Once a website has been designed and completed the final balance of payment is then due in accordance with our payment terms.
There are no exceptions to this, i.e. if the client decides they no longer want the site, as they have commissioned the work and paid a deposit they are still obliged to pay for
has been completed to the client’s satisfaction and no refunds can be offered. We do offer free updates up to a maximum of 4 hours for a month after completion to allow for any final amendments that may be required.
Database, Application and E-Commerce Development
Digital Watermelon Consulting cannot take responsibility for any losses incurred by the use of any software created for the client. Whilst every care has been taken to ensure products
are problem free and accurate, the ultimate responsibility lies with the client in ensuring that all software is functioning correctly before use.
Any scripts, applications or software (unless specifically agreed) written by Digital Watermelon Consulting remain the copyright of Digital Watermelon Consulting and may only be commercially reproduced or resold with the permission of Digital Watermelon Consulting.
Where applications or sites are developed on servers not recommended by Digital Watermelon Consulting, the client is expected to provide or seek any information, additional software,
support or co-operation pertaining to the server required in order for the application to be correctly developed. Where large applications are to be developed, it is the client’s responsibility to provide a suitable testing environment which is identical to the final production environment.
The client is expected to test fully any application or programming relating to a site developed by Digital Watermelon Consulting before being made generally available for use.
Where “bugs”, errors or other issues are found after the site is live, Digital Watermelon Consulting will endeavour (but is not obliged to) to correct these issues to meet the standards of
function outlined in the brief.
Compatibility
Digital Watermelon Consulting will endeavour to ensure that any developed/designed site or application will function correctly on the server it is initially installed in and that it will function
correctly when viewed with the web browsing software Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 and up, and to an acceptable level with Other browsers, such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari. Digital Watermelon Consulting can offer no guarantees of correct function with all browser software as they constantly change.
Digital Watermelon Consulting reserve the right to refuse to handle in any way, material which may be deemed offensive, illegal or in any way controversial, and also to terminate any web
hosting service we provide for clients should the necessity arise.
Website Optimisation
Due to external factors, such as changes to the way search engines rank websites, we cannot offer any guarantees regarding the position we will achieve for websites.
The process of optimizing websites itself will bring in more traffic and hits and you’ll see visits increase to your site naturally. We cannot accept liability for any change in rankings, or drop off in the position of your website due to changes in the algorithms of the search engines or the factors that they use to rank websites.
We use ‘white hat techniques’ when optimizing websites and always aim to achieve a top ten ranking for your website within six months of undertaking the optimization process. Due to the work involved payment is generally required in advance and we are unable to offer a refund of any manifesto clients in relation to this type of work.
Digital Watermelon Consulting reserve the right to refuse to handle in any way, material which may be deemed offensive, illegal or in any way controversial.
Service abuse and spam policy
We reserve the right to terminate your hosting account if it is found that the resources made available to you are being abused.
This includes, but is not limited to the following:
- Spamming
- Sending unsolicited mail.
- Providing file storage services.
- Providing email services via your website, be it newsletter sending or services like gmail.com and hotmail.com.
- Scripting that utilises more than 20% of a server or node’s memory, storage, processing resource, I/O at any one time.
- Hosted services that cause the general performance of our servers or nodes to degrade.
- Offensive conduct / content.
- Illegal or other unacceptable content as outlined in 17)
Digital Watermelon Consulting will not allow spam to be generated from our machines – if it is found that a site is sending out spam emails regardless of how it is done (scripts, SMTP, contact form header injection etc.) Digital Watermelon Consulting will suspend the customer’s account until assured it will not continue. Repeat offenders will be irreversibly terminated.
Should you infringe this policy, you will be held liable for any costs incurred by Digital Watermelon Consulting.
Correspondence
Customers are required to have a valid email address on file at all times. Details can be updated at any time by sending an email to [email protected]
All communication from Digital Watermelon Consulting will be done via email. When we send an email, it is deemed that the delivery of the said email has reached the recipient.
If in the event that your email address on file does not work, you may use our support system at https://www.digitalwatermelon.com/contact-us/
Customers may not resell any of our services without written permission given by Digital Watermelon Consulting.
Contract Period
Unless otherwise stated the contract period is on a monthly basis, termination can occur at any point during the month, there is a 30 day cancellation notification period but any domains can be transferred away at any time, provided all amounts owed to us are paid. If there is still an outstanding amount, the account will continue to be billed until the account is settled and the cancellation request is resent and accepted by Digital Watermelon Consulting. Cancellation requests need to be sent to Digital Watermelon Consulting via email and must be on a valid company letterhead.
High resource use policy
Resources are defined as bandwidth, processor utilisation, memory, or disk space.
Digital Watermelon Consulting may implement the following policy to its sole discretion:
When a website is found to be monopolising the resources available, Digital Watermelon Consulting reserves the right to suspend that site immediately. This policy is only implemented in extreme circumstances and is intended to prevent the misuse of our servers. Customers may be offered an option whereby Digital Watermelon Consulting continues hosting the website for an additional fee or the client may choose to upgrade to a (semi-)dedicated plan.
Uploads via scripting languages
We limit uploads made via scripting languages – including PHP, ASP and ASP.NET – to a maximum of 20 MB per file.
Cron jobs may not have an interval of less than 5 minutes.
Email sending from our servers is limited to 250 emails per hour, per domain name. This is to help preserve the integrity of our outgoing mail servers, so they are not listed on spam blacklists.
Payment policies
All accounts are set up on a prepay basis. Although Digital Watermelon Consulting reserves the right to change prices of accounts or services at any time, all pricing is guaranteed for the period of prepayment: every 1, 3, 6 or 12 months depending on the hosting plan you choose.
Payment must be made no later than 15 days from invoice.
Customers will automatically be charged again at the end of their prepaid period unless a closure / cancellation notification has already been sent to us via email which must be confirmed and acceptance via a return email notification from us.
In situations where payment is not made by the 15th day from invoice, Digital Watermelon Consulting reserves the right to immediately suspend your domain until the outstanding charge is processed successfully. In addition, Digital Watermelon Consulting reserves the right to suspend any other services until the outstanding debt is cleared. The customer is responsible for all money owed on the account from the time it was established to the time the customer sends an accepted written cancellation request (refer to “Contract Period” above).
Should your account fall into arrears (over 30 days) we will suspend the accounts you have with us. A re-establishment (un-suspension) fee of R80 will be charged to have your website(s) or services unsuspended once full payment has been made.
Your account with us is billed as a whole unit and not on a per invoice basis: When payments are made they are put towards the invoice
No bills or invoices will be sent by regular mail. All invoices will be sent directly to customers via email shortly after the purchase has been made.
All payments are in South African Rands (ZAR).
You are required to have a valid email address registered on your account at all times, failure to do so may result in invoices not being delivered and consequently suspension of your account.
Please note that whilst this is primarily used for billing purposes, Digital Watermelon Consulting reserves the right to email you information about enhancements to our systems and product offerings.
If one of your services with us is currently suspended because of non-payment, and you have corrected this by making full payment to your account (full payment is when you bring the account balance to zero or you’re in credit with us). Then you will need to email [email protected] in order to have the account unsuspended.
It is your responsibility to keep your account up to date, and to pay all invoices within the stipulated payment period. It is also your responsibility to keep yourself informed of the amounts owing should you be paying via EFT.
Payments made either via Paypal or a wire transfer will be subjected to additional fees such as, conversion fees (from currencies other than Dollars (Paypal)) or bank fees (wire transfers). These additional costs will be for the clients account.
Domains
The client is welcome to register domains by themselves and have them hosted with us.
If a domain is registered through us: we will be responsible for issuing an invoice for the registration and renewal of the domain. In the case of co.za domains, we invoice you for the domain; you are to pay us directly for this registration or renewal.
All domains registered by us are registered on behalf of the client and will be the property of the client provided their account is in good standing. We reserve the right to 1) refuse the transferal of a domain or 2) delete the domain from the registrar should your account be in arrears and be deleted from our system.
An indication of a domain name being available during the order process is no guarantee that it will be secured for the client. As there is no guarantee that the domain checking script is accurate due to variations in DNS records, or the domain name may be registered by another party between the time of checking and our request going through to the registrar.
We will only vote for a transfer of a domain name away (co.za in particular); if we get written permission from the domain owner to do so.
Accounts on servers
If an account is set up on a server, and the domain is not registered – we reserve the right to remove the account from a server within the DNS cluster in order to set it up, should we get a request to do so by a client who is registering the domain through us. This would normally apply to new domain registrations; as our system won’t allow us to setup accounts if the same domain name exists on another server within our DNS cluster.
Payment options
Digital Watermelon Consulting currently runs the following payment methods:
- EFT Electronic Banking Payments into our account.
- PayPal (Please contact us for our detail)
Cancellation and refunds
Digital Watermelon Consulting reserves the right to cancel the service at any time. In this event, customers will be entitled to a pro rata refund based upon the remaining period of membership. If a customer contravenes Digital Watermelon Consulting’s terms of service a refund will not be issued in the event of a cancellation.
Any abuse of our staff in any format or medium will result in the suspension or termination of your services.
Customers may cancel their account at any time provided that their account is fully paid up. You can request a statement of your account by sending an email to [email protected]. All account cancellations are processed within 12 hours from the cancellation request. We do not schedule cancellations so please ensure that requests are sent on the day of intended termination.
Once an account is cancelled or removed due to non-payment, all data pertaining to the account will be removed from our servers.
Fees charged on a prepay basis are non-refundable. In addition, some accounts incur set-up fees, these charges are also non-refundable.
Privacy Policy
We will not share your private (personally-identifiable) information with any third party unless required to do so by a member of law enforcement authorities, or to protect others.
We may need to give out your hosting login details to our 3rd level engineers at the respective data centres in order to support you further. Information send via email will be used to support you for billing and hosting support requests by the respective engineers.
Customer checks, Credit Bureau
We may check your credit history on the credit bureau by using services like TransUnion or Experian. The information obtained will be used to confirm your payment history, contact details and to see if your account is within the risk profile we are willing to accommodate / service.
We may refuse service to customers whom we feel are at risk of not paying their account on time and in full.
Arbitration
If any issue needs to go to arbitration or legal assistance – this must be done within the city of Digital Watermelon Consulting’s choice. Arbitration may only be done on an individual basis.
Indemnification
Digital Watermelon Consulting reserves the right to refuse service and/or access to its servers to anyone. Digital Watermelon Consulting reserves the right to move your domain to a different web server without previous notice. We will however make every effort to keep your sites uptime at 100% during this process.
Digital Watermelon Consulting does not allow any of the following content to be stored on its servers:
- Explicit Adult material – includes all pornography, erotic images, or otherwise lewd or obscene content.
- Excessive download content or non-linked content.
- Off-site backups.
- Spam, Phishing and any such illegal activities.
- Illegal content – according to South African or USA Federal, State or City law
- Copyright media which you do not own the copyright to.
- Account usage for backup purposes.
- Sites with banners, graphics or cgi’s running from their domain being used on other domains.
- Sites with immense graphic archives or galleries.
- Sites offering immense download archives, such as .zip, .tar, .rar, .GZ and so on.
- Sites running large chat room gatherings.
- Topsites
- IRC Scripts and Bots of any kind unless it was explicitly permitted by management
- Proxy scripts/anonymizers
- Image hosting similar to Photobucket, Twitpic, Imageshack and others
- AutoSurf/PTC/PTS/PPC sites
- IP scanners
- Bruteforce Programs/Scripts/Applications
- Mail Bombers/Spam Scripts
- Banner-Ad services (commercial banner ad rotation)
- File Dump/Mirror similar to Rapidshare and others
- Audio Streaming with more than one or two streams
- Escrow, Bank Debentures, Bank Debenture Trading programs and sites
- High-Yield Interest Programs (HYIP) or related sites
- Investment Sites (FOREX, E-Gold Exchange, Second Life/Linden Exchange, Ponzi, MLM/Pyramid Scheme and such)
- Prime Banks Programs
- Lottery sites
- MUDs/RPGs/PBBGs
- Hacker focused sites/archives/programs
- Sites promoting illegal activities
- Forums and/or websites that distribute or link to warez/pirated/illegal content
- Fraudulent Sites of any kind
- Mailer Pro hosting sites
- Sale of any controlled substance without prior proof of appropriate permit(s)
Refusal of service is entirely at the unfettered discretion of Digital Watermelon Consulting.
Customer agrees that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold Digital Watermelon Consulting harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and claims, including reasonable attorney’s fees asserted against any of the afore mentioned, 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 to customer, its agents, employees or assigns. Customer agrees to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Digital Watermelon Consulting against liabilities arising out of; (1) any injury, financial loss, to person or property caused by any products sold or otherwise distributed in connection with Digital Watermelon Consulting; (2) any material supplied by customer infringing or allegedly infringing on the proprietary rights of a third party; (3) copyright infringement and (4) any defective products sold to customer from Digital Watermelon Consulting.
Backup Policy
We advise all clients to make periodic backups of their websites by downloading a copy of their website and data to their local personal computer. cPanel provides a useful backup section where it will compress your entire site databases and emails kept on the server, into one file for you to download. We advise this because it is very possible that due to system compromise or “act of God” that all data and backups might be lost and your copy will be the only one available. As unfortunate and unlikely as this would be, it is a possibility.
Disclaimer
Digital Watermelon Consulting will not be responsible for any damages you or your business may suffer. Digital Watermelon Consulting makes no warranties of any kind, expressed or implied for services we provide. Digital Watermelon Consulting does back up your data/website and whilst every attempt would be made in the unlikely event of any corruption or hardware failure, Digital Watermelon Consulting cannot guarantee to be able to replace lost data. Digital Watermelon Consulting disclaims any warranty or merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This includes loss of data resulting from delays, non-deliveries, wrong delivery, domain loss, and any and all service interruptions. Digital Watermelon Consulting reserves the right to revise its policies and terms and conditions at any time.
By signing up for any of our services you agree to be bound by all Digital Watermelon Consulting’s terms and conditions.
Our terms and conditions may be updated from time to time, please be sure to keep updated by referring to this document regularly. Document source: https://www.digitalwatermelon.com/terms-and-conditions/
