Acceptable Use Policy

An acceptable use policy (AUP) is designed to protect our users and the internet at large from potentially damaging actions, as well as to provide general advice on what you shall and shall not to do. This AUP is laid down in a manner akin to the U. K. road laws: the road traffic act specifies in a legal framework what must happen, and the highway code gives advice on general etiquette to follow. Details regarding how to complain about a breach of this AUP can be found at the end of this document.

In general, the AUP is designed to protect all users of the internet from activity that is harmful, unpleasant or is generally undesirable. As a rule of thumb, any activity that brings Virtualapps UK into 'disrepute' ( e.g. by causing our networks' IP addresses and domains, hosted or otherwise, to become filtered, black holed or blacklisted by third party networks or devices) is forbidden. If you in any doubt as to what constitutes a breach of the AUP, you are advised to contact us for our advice. We cannot be held responsible for any activities that occur that are not expressly prohibited by this AUP, and ignorance of your actions and their potential consequences cannot be accepted as an excuse for breaking this AUP.

General areas of prohibited activity

The following areas give examples of what is generally not tolerated. Please note that this list is not exhaustive and that users are expected to abide by the spirit of these terms in order to keep the internet a generally happy place.

  • Privacy
    • Any attempt to gain unauthorised access to any electronic device, system or network without consent from the owner of the device, system or network is strictly prohibited. This includes (but is not limited to):
      • Port scanning (using nmap, Retina etc.)
      • The use of "root kits" to take advantage of known exploits of systems
    • Senior technical staff from Virtualapps UK may, from time to time, perform port scans or other scans of servers on our networks in order to prevent or diagnose potential issues. Information obtained from this will be held in the strictest confidence and will only be disclosed to third parties in the case of an official police (or other official body) investigation.
  • Threatening behaviour or harassment
    • Threatening or harassing behaviour of any user on the internet (on our networks or not) by any electronic method of transmission ( e.g. via email, newsgroups or postings to an online web forum) is expressly forbidden. We will not tolerate any form of abusive behaviour towards other users of the internet, whether this be of a sexual, racial, homophobic or any other derogatory or illegal remark.
  • Impersonation or forgery
    • The impersonation of another person or network device by adding, altering, removing or in any other way modifying network (IP) header information (spoofing) or email headers with the aim of deceiving or misleading any other user or device is prohibited. Our servers and routers are configured wherever possible to filter out such forged headers, but it cannot always be 100% accurate. Also, this does not prevent other users on the internet that are not on our network from behaving in this manner.
  • Explicitly illegal activities
    • Any illegal activity is prohibited. This includes:
      • The hosting and distribution of pirated software ( warez ).
      • The hosting of pornographic material.
      • The hosting or distribution of any other material (for example music or video files) for which you are not the copyright holder, or for which you do not have the permission of the actual copyright holder.

Particular areas of netiquette

The following sections discuss particular areas and issues that you must abide by when using the internet.

Email

  • We do not tolerate, endorse or participate in email spamming. We do not tolerate these activities from our customers or our resellers' customers.
  • The use of any of our hosted email or web site addresses to collect responses from spam email (whether this was sent from within our network or not) is forbidden.
  • If you run your own mail server, you must take every precaution to ensure that it isn't an open relay. Should we receive complaints that your server is being used as an open relay we may disconnect or disable it without notice until such a time as we can make contact with the administrator of the server.
  • When using mailing lists, you must only send to recipients that have explicitly agreed to receive such email via an opt-in mailing list [with a confirmation email upon joining].
  • Mailing lists must have identifiable contact and removal instructions contained within the body of each message sent to the list.
  • In the event of a customer or a resellers' customer using an unsolicited list, we may terminate the account with no notice. We will use every practical means in order to contact the customer to inform them of this.

Web

  • The posting of illegal or material holder on a web site or anonymous FTP site for which you are not the copyright holder, or do not have the permission of the actual copyright is prohibited.
  • We will co-operate with any relevant outside authorities to remedy any breaches.

Excessive resources utilisation

  • On any Virtualapps managed server where your server resides, we stipulate that you may use a 'reasonable' amount of the server's resources ( e.g. disk, CPU, memory and bandwidth).
  • In the case where excessive usage of any one or more of these items by a single person, site or script occurs we may take action to prevent detrimental effects to other users. We will take every practical step to notify the end user in this case.
  • For the avoidance of doubt, 'reasonable' is defined on a per case basis by a senior member of our technical staff.

What to do when you feel our AUP has been breached and what action we'll take

If you feel any part of our AUP has been breached by any of our customers, please email our staff who deal with incidents of this nature on the below email address:

abuse@virtualapps.co.uk

When submitting an abuse report, please include the following information where relevant:

  • The originating IP address that you believe is in breach of the AUP
  • The precise date and time that the breach was committed, including any local time offsets where your local time zone is not GMT
  • Extracts from log files showing network activity, or evidence of the abuse, including full email headers showing the path and origin in the case of spam email.
  • Other situations may require additional information which will be asked for in the case of a complaint ( e.g. the URL of a website containing illegal material).

If we find that our AUP has been breached, we may take one or more of the following actions:

  • Issue a warning: either verbally or in writing (via email or surface mail)
  • Filter, blacklist or black hole IP addresses or domain names involved in breaches of the AUP without notice
  • Suspend items on the customers' accounts relating to the breach or otherwise
  • Suspend the customer's account entirely
  • Terminate the customer's account

It is very rare that we take unilateral action against a customer without attempting to arrange an amicable solution first, however, we will take swift action in the most serious cases before contacting you. It is the responsibility of the customer to ensure that their contact details with us are kept up to date by informing us of any changes or corrections.
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