As already mentionned, all accounts benefit the fact of having no limits on their resources. That means that you can upload 25 Gig to your ftp, just like you could use 75 Gig in bandwidth while having a 750 Mb email box. But these peaks in usage have to be temporary. We hate "suspended accounts pages" so that is why you'll never see one on your account.

All these privileges come from the fact that we charge equitable amounts for hosting accounts. If an account is to use a bigger percentage of the server's resources, thus preventing from hosting more or bigger accounts, then we will increase the monthly charge accordingly. Should an account use 100% of the server's resources, it's only fair the customer be charged 100% of the server's costs.

Considering we all know that importing a database, for example, may use up all the CPU for a short while, we all agree that using too much of the CPU for too long will hurt everyone's performance in matters regarding all services. We will tolerate intense CPU work for short bursts. But we will investigate all CPU abusive usage.

There are many ways to use RAM on a server. Normal usage of an account will not cause this since the server is very well balanced and configured. But should one be able to abuse RAM, the account will be investigated. The most frequent causes of high RAM usage are:

• unoptimized SQL queries or tables (either queries to unindexed tables or good queries on large tables)
• email account receiving a lot of emails (we really mean A LOT)
• websites with poorly written webpage code (unoptimized php loop for example) that receive a few pages viewed per hour
• websites receiving several thousand pages viewed per hour (even with good code and queries)
• trying to make the server do something it's not configured for (executing webpages repeatedly that you know take a long time and that will expire the server's execution time limit for example)

We will accept any reasonable disk space usage for all accounts. If you have a website selling pictures, it's normal you need more space then someone talking about lizards. But if you sign up for an account at 3$ a month, don't expect we will think that storing 15 Gig of video for streaming will be considered normal (considering the bandwidth that will be used too).

But in the event you are using some 2-3-4 Gig more for 24-48 hours because you need a big file transfered to someone, we will alwais look the other direction.

Bandwidth usage is exactly as disk space usage. Use it, don't abuse it is the modo once again.

Having your employees (our yourself) with email clients checking for new messages every minutes will be considered abuse. Imagine the futileness for all of us checking for new mails every single minute of every single day and you'll see that we will consider accepting a mail check every 5 minutes and more.

Let's look at the following example: 158 emails accounts checking for new messages every minutes, of which 50% have computers running around the clock and the others only 8 hours a day means ( 79 accounts * 24 hours * 60 minutes ) + ( 79 accounts * 8 hours * 60 minutes ) = 151680 checks per day. And this is not counting Patrick on the phone with a customer who just told him that he sent him an order via email and Patrick frantically clicking his "send/receive" button like his vacation paycheck depended on it.

Statistically speaking: It is our experience that, for a normal user, checking for new messages every 10 minutes during business hours represents receiving new emails approximately 1 time out of 15. Why check every minute and make this 1 out of 150?

Spamming will not be tolerated. Should you take ANY actions in order to get our server listed in ANY spam fighting association/agency will get your account instantaneously suspended.

If your account is not configured for using a specific port for a specific need, shell access or any unmentionned item here, you are automatically considered abusing resources.

These actions will result in an IP address being banned instantaneously:

• trying to login as root via ssh (our root account simply can't login to ssh, so we know it's not us trying)
• scanning our ports repeatedly
• trying to brute force a password on an existing user's account
• trying to gain shell access if you do not go through an existing user's account

These actions will result in an IP address being eventually banned:

• failing to login a couple of times with your account/password (making mistakes an undisclosed number of times)
• making repeated/unnecessary requests to ports/services
• receiving too many pages viewed by an IP address to the same website (leeching or autosurfs for example)

If it's illegal in Canada, we won't tolerate it. Here are some examples:

• racism
• illegal nudity like pedofilia, zoofilia and others
• snuff
• torrent, warez, file farm, etc

To name just these few.

Abuse cases are always taken seriously and actions are always incremental in their span/consequences.

Remember that we don't like surprises and we know it's the same for you. Don't surprise us using 1 Terabytes (1000 Gig) of bandwidth or using ports opened for other accounts and we will not surprise you either.

Depending on the situation, actions will vary from a simple email being sent to you asking you to correct the situation (with an acceptable grace period) to, in the very worst case scenario, immediate and irrevocable account termination.

If you have an interesting article/script/solution that should be present here, please write with it.