Terms of Service

v 1.02

Last updated: 07/04/2016

Effective immediately for new customers, from 08/05/2016 for customers that subscribed to services provided by Alex Ward Web Services before 08/04/2016. Until those respective dates, all previous agreements and terms apply.

The following terms (“Terms”, “Terms and Conditions”) govern the use of all services (known as the “Service”) provided by Alex Ward Web Services. It is an agreement between you (“you”, “your”, the “customer” or “client”) and Alex Ward Web Services (“us”, “we”, or “our”), sometimes referred to as AWWS.

Your access to and use of the Service is conditioned on your acceptance of and compliance with these Terms. Please read through these Terms and Conditions carefully.

This agreement is governed by English law.

By accessing or using the Service you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you disagree with any part of the terms then you may not access the Service.

This agreement is broken down into eight (8) sections, which are:

  1. Changes to this agreement
  2. Charges, pricing and payments
  3. Cancellation and refunds
  4. Acceptable usage
  5. Limitations to our ability to provide Service
  6. Data collection and your privacy
  7. Terms specific to the provision of callouts
  8. Complaints

1. Changes to this agreement

1.1. We reserve the right to change these Terms and Conditions at any time with a minimum of 30 days notice. We will endeavour to provide as much notice as possible above the minimum 30 days notice.

1.2. If we choose or are required to update these Terms and Conditions, we will notify you by email to the most up-to-date record we have on file.

1.3. You will be required to agree to the new Terms and Conditions when the new Terms and Conditions take effect in order to continue use of our Service. The effective date is shown at the top of these Terms and Conditions.

1.4. If you do not agree to any changes to our Terms and Conditions, then you have the right to request termination of your access to our Service. We will refund you for any unused portions of your service in accordance with our Refund policy (see section 3).

1.5. If you do agree to the supplied changes to our Terms and Conditions, then you may simply continue to use our Service.

2. Charges, pricing and payments

2.1. You must pay any charges that are agreed between you and us in a timely manor according to any invoices that are issued.

2.2. If you fail to pay invoices issued to you on time, we reserve the right to suspend your access to our Service and/or charge an administration fee (currently £5).

2.2.1. If you fail to pay invoices issued to you on time that include the renewal of a domain name registration, we reserve the right to pass on late renewal costs that are issued to us together with an administration fee (currently £5). All wholesale domain registrars issue fees if domain names are not renewed on time. We will update any invoices to include late renewal fees if an invoice runs overdue. This fee can be avoided by cancelling the domain renewal or postponing the domain renewal until it is no longer registered (usually around 60 days). If you fail to pay for or choose to postpone a domain renewal, you solely accept any risk of loss of domain loss or purchase by another party.

2.3. If your provided payment method fails to clear and your invoice is consequently not paid on time, we reserve the right to suspend your access to our Service and/or charge an administration fee (currently £5).

2.4. None of our prices are currently inclusive of VAT. VAT is not currently applicable to our invoices. We cannot provide VAT receipts.

2.5. We reserve the right to change our prices from time to time (for example, because of changes in market pricing). If we make a price revision, we will notify you with a minimum of 30 days notice.

2.6. Price revisions, whether revised up or down, do not affect any service or portion of service that you have already paid for.

2.7. We may decrease our prices at our discretion as frequently as we wish.

2.8. We will not increase our prices for any single service more than once within any 12 month period.

2.9. We may occasionally offer a product at a discount under a promotion. Promotions or promotional prices can be withdrawn at any time without notice.

3. Cancellation and refunds

3.1. You may request cancellation of your access to our Service at any time by contacting us.

3.2. We may suspend, limit or cancel your access to our Service if you break any of the terms listed in this agreement – specifically the terms listed in section 2 and 4. Any notice period and refund for services cancelled by us will depend on the circumstance and is defined in each of the relevant conditions.

3.3. Upon cancellation of our web hosting service by you, we will provide you with a refund for any unused complete months that have been pre-paid. We will provide any refund in the form of a bank transfer (BACS) to your desired bank account within 10 working days of cancellation. Any refund must be issued to a bank account in the name of the account holder. We may ask for proof that the bank account details supplied for a refund are in the name of the account holder.

3.4. Upon cancellation of a domain name registration by you, no refund will be provided. The domain can be transferred to another provider preserving any unused registration period. We will provide all necessary details to transfer a domain name to another provider. We will not pay any costs associated with transferring a domain name to another provider.

3.5. Upon cancellation of an Updates and Maintenance agreement (see Updates and Maintenance) by you, no refund will be provided. Any unused portion of the service may continue to be used until the service expires or is entirely consumed.

3.6. All other charges, such as callout charges, are non-refundable once the service associated with the charge has been carried out. For example, if you request a callout, the service has been carried out once we have visited your property on the date we agreed to carry out work. Additional terms apply to callouts (please see section 7).

4. Acceptable usage

4.1. We reserve the right to investigate any suspected violation of the terms defined in this section. When we become aware of any suspected violation, we may begin an investigation, which may involve checking any files that are stored on our servers under your account credentials (including any backups that we have made), as well as checking your account’s usage logs and statistics.

4.2. You are responsible for ensuring that your account remains in good standing. This means that you must ensure that your account does not exceed any provided usage allowances. You must also ensure that any files stored on our servers under your account credentials do not contain or exhibit any prohibited material as defined in section 4.3.

4.3. Our web hosting services are provided to you subject to you not storing or exhibiting any of the following material or types of material on our servers:

  • Pornography and/or child pornography or exploitation;
  • Copyrighted material of which do you not hold the rights to distribute or publish;
  • Content that violates or infringes the intellectual property rights of another individual or organisation;
  • Illegal content or content that promotes illegal actions or activity;
  • Content that promotes or encourages the use of terrorism and/or violence against people, animals or property;
  • Content that promotes, encourages or engages in the use of spam or unwarranted bulk mail, computer hacking or network hacking;
  • Content that contains viruses, worms, trojan horses or any other form of malware or other code, files or programs designed to, or capable of, disrupting, damaging or limiting the functionality of any software or hardware.

4.4. In the event that, as a result of an investigation we have conducted, we find any material that is mentioned in section 4.3 of this agreement, we can suspend any or all of your services without prior notice if it is deemed necessary by means of a legal notice or warrant provided by an enforcing body. Wherever possible, we will endeavour to provide you with a notice period (of up to 48 hours) in order to correct the violation without interruption to the service we provide to you.

4.5. Failure to correct any violation we inform you about within a given notice period will result in either (solely at our discretion):

  • Us removing the offending content from our servers;
  • Us suspending your services until the violation is corrected.

4.5. In the event that we suspend your services due to an uncorrected violation as defined in section 4.1, 4.3 and 4.4, you will not be entitled to any compensation or refund.

4.6. Our web hosting services are provided with a defined usage allowance. In the event that this usage allowance is exceeded, we may limit, throttle or suspend your services until either:

  • Any additional payment required in order to continue access to our service is paid;
  • Any usage allowance resets due to a new hosting charging period beginning. For the purposes of this agreement, a hosting charging period is a calendar month, and a charging period resets on the monthly anniversary of your hosting services commencing.

4.7. If you consume your defined usage allowances, we will contact you to advise that you reduce your usage or increase your usage allowances (for an additional fee). In the event of a first occurrence, we will not take any further action. If this occurrence occurs frequently and/or consistently and no correcting action is taken, we may suspend your services or provide you with 30 days notice of account closure. In the event that we close your account due to failure to take correcting action, we will, at your request, provide a refund for any complete unused months in the form of a bank transfer (BACS) to your desired bank account within 10 working days of closure.  Any refund must be issued to a bank account in the name of the account holder. We may ask for proof that the bank account details supplied for a refund are in the name of the account holder.

5. Limitations to our ability to provide Service

5.1. There are certain limitations that can affect our ability to provide you with a service. These can include, but are not limited to:

  • Loss of power at our datacenter;
  • Hacking or exploit of our server equipment (although we will make all reasonable efforts to ensure our servers are protected against known security threats);
  • Failure of equipment or hardware at our datacenter, such as hard drives;
  • Fire and theft;
  • Vandalism.

5.2. Due to the current size and scale of the business, we do not provide any specific figure in terms of an uptime guarantee at the time of writing this agreement. Our uptime target is 99% of each calendar year or better, however this is not provided a guarantee. However, we will make all reasonable efforts to ensure services are online and available at all times. In the event of a server outage, we will endeavour to correct any faults as soon as possible. In the event of a server outage, we will also keep all customers informed while we correct the fault through our Facebook page. We have monitors in place to ensure that we are informed about any outages as soon as possible.

5.3. We shall not be liable for any loss of profit, revenue, contracts, anticipated savings or consequential loss as a result of our services being unavailable to you. We may choose, solely at our discretion, to provide a free-of-charge extension to any service or services that you are subscribed to if an outage is prolonged or unresolvable for an extended period of time due to matters outside of our control.

5.4. We shall not be liable for any lost or destroyed data or software. We take daily and weekly backups of all web sites hosted on our servers in order to minimise the risk of data loss in the event of a hardware failure. Backups are not backdated.

6. Data collection and your privacy

6.1. In order to provide our services to you, we need to collect certain pieces of information from you. These can include:

  • Your name;
  • Your address;
  • Your telephone number;
  • Your email address;
  • Your payment details.

6.2. We will not share information (defined in section 6.1) with any third party without your consent.

6.3. We have a responsibility, in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998, that all information we hold about you is accurate, up to date, relevant and necessary to the services we are providing. You have a right to know what information we currently hold about you – if you wish have a copy provided to you please contact us. We may contact you from time to time to confirm that all information we hold about you is up to date.

6.4. Any credit/debit card payment details are not handled or stored by us. Credit/debit card payments are managed for us on our behalf by PayPal and/or Stripe.

7. Terms specific to the provision of callouts

7.1. All callouts are charged at an hourly rate (unless otherwise agreed in a written quotation). We calculate and quote an estimate of all callout charges over the phone or by email (or in a formal written quotation if requested) prior to a callout commencing for the avoidance of doubt.

7.2. Callout charges are based on the time taken to complete the service, not the service objective (unless otherwise agreed in a written quotation). This means that we may need to charge additional amounts if we can’t complete a service in the original estimate due to circumstances outside of our control, such as:

  • Hardware failure;
  • Slow internet connections for downloading necessary software or resources;
  • Electricity or internet outages;
  • Damaged recovery media provided by the customer.

7.3. If you fail to be present for an agreed callout appointment or you make a cancellation less than 3 hours prior to the agreed appointment time, you will be charged £25, in addition to quoted travel expenses, regardless of whether the service is rescheduled.

8. Complaints

8.1. We are fully committed to addressing any complains that you may have. If you wish to make a complaint, you can do by using our contact details. We will acknowledge your complaint within 5 working days and endeavour to formulate a completed response as quickly as possible following that acknowledgement.