Acceptable Use Policy

First Capital Hosting has a zero tolerance policy for SPAM and warez. Any websites found to contain, promote, or link to such content, in the sole judgment of First Capital Hosting, are subject to immediate removal from our service without refund, and possible imposition of fees as described below.

1. First Capital Hosting cannot be held responsible for the content of pages hosted under our service. First Capital Hosting does not review pages for content before they are posted and does not verify, endorse, or otherwise take responsibility for the content of any user-created pages. However, we reserve the right to remove any page or website from our servers which we determine is violating our rules and guidelines. Users are solely responsible for all files contained in their own directory, and can be held legally liable for the contents of their website.

2. First Capital Hosting may terminate user accounts at any time, without notice, for conduct that, in the sole judgment of First Capital Hosting staff, violates these guidelines or for any other reason. First Capital Hosting may terminate user accounts and delete any and all user information for conduct that First Capital Hosting believes is harmful to the business of First Capital Hosting or to any of its users or partners. Pages found violating these items may be subject to immediate deletion and removal from our server(s). The following is a nonexclusive list of content and behaviors that are UNACCEPTABLE on First Capital Hosting.

Content that condones, promotes, contains, or links to warez, cracks, hacks, their associated utilities, or other piracy-related information.
Content that has been promoted through the sending of unsolicited email (spamming) or mail fraud schemes.
Content that promotes or condones the sending of unsolicited email.
Content that permits the use of First Capital Hosting servers to send or receive unsolicited bulk email ("spam").
Content that commits acts of copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret or other intellectual property infringement.
Content that is racist, or otherwise extremely offensive to others.
Websites that exploit images of children under 18 years of age.
Content that contains, links to, or participates in pyramid schemes, gambling, raffles, lotteries, and so forth.
Content that posts or discloses personal identification information or private information of individuals under the age of 13 or in connection with materials directed toward individuals under the age of 13 without verifiable parental consent.
Content that provides, sells, or offers to sell the following: controlled substances, illegal drugs and drug contraband, alcohol, weapons, pirated materials, programs to attack others, illegal goods, escort services, instructions on making, assembling, or obtaining illegal goods or weapons, information used to break copyright or trademark violations, to destroy others' property, or to harm any people or animals.
Content that takes part in, or allows any third party to take part in, the following: reverse engineering, reverse compiling or otherwise deriving the underlying source code or structure or sequence of the Technology; password cracking; altering copyright notices and attributes (unless permitted in writing by the author/owner); and such practices.
Knowingly engage in any activities designed to harass, or that will cause a denial-of-service to any other user whether on the First Capital Hosting network or on another provider's network.
Unauthorized access, alteration, destruction, or any attempt thereof, of any information of any First Capital Hosting customers or end-users by any means or device.
Obtaining or attempting to obtain service by any means or device with intent to avoid payment.
Unauthorized attempts by a user to gain access to any account or computer resource not belonging to that user (e.g., "cracking").
Transmission, distribution or storage of any material in violation of any applicable law or regulation is prohibited. This includes, without limitation, material protected by copyright, trademark, trade secret or other intellectual property right used without proper authorization, and material that is obscene, defamatory, constitutes an illegal threat, or violates export control laws.
Sending Unsolicited Bulk Email ("UBE", "spam"). The sending of any form of Unsolicited Bulk Email through First Capital Hosting servers is prohibited. Likewise, the sending of UBE from another service provider advertizing a website, email address or utilizing any resource hosted on First Capital Hosting servers, is prohibited.
First Capital Hosting accounts or services may not be used to solicit customers from, or collect replies to, messages sent from another Internet Service Provider where those messages violate this Policy or that of the other provider.
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 First Capital 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 lists of email addresses from 3rd parties for mailing to or from any First Capital Hosting-hosted domain, or referencing any First Capital Hosting account, is prohibited.
Advertising, transmitting, or otherwise making available any software, program, product, or service that is designed to violate this AUP or the AUP of 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, denial of service attacks.
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.
All commercial emails must be CAN-SPAM compliant. Any customer found to be sending commerical emails in violation of the CAN-SPAM act will have his/her account immediately suspened pending further review.

3. Each First Capital Hosting customer is responsible for the activities of its users and, by accepting service from First Capital Hosting, is agreeing to ensure that its customers/representatives or end-users abide by this Policy. Complaints about customers/representatives or end-users of any First Capital Hosting customer will be forwarded to the First Capital Hosting customer's postmaster for action. If violations of the First Capital Hosting Acceptable Use Policy occur, First Capital Hosting reserves the right to terminate services with or take action to stop the offending customer from violating First Capital Hosting's AUP as First Capital Hosting deems appropriate, without notice.

4. In the event your website is terminated for violation of our policies, a clean-up fee of US$125 per hour may be imposed in addition to any other damages or expenses that may arise from your (mis)use of our services.

5. First Capital Hosting reserves the right to amend or change these guidelines at any time without notice. This Acceptable Use Policy and any disputes arising out of or related to the Service and First Capital Hosting websites shall be governed by, and construed and enforced in accordance with, the laws of the State of Pennsylvania.

Unsolicited Commercial Email

Complaints should be emailed to abuse@firstcapitalhosting.com

All complaints must include the full, unmodified header information from the email received. Note a simple forward WILL NOT suffice. If in doubt, visit http://www.stopspam.org/email/headers/headers.html for more information regarding email headers. SPAM complaints which do not contain headers will be disregarded.

Everything Else

Please forward your complaint to abuse@firstcapitalhosting.com

Include all relevant information such as the time, date of the event, log files etc. All abuse complaints will be handled by a member of the First Capital Hosting staff. Upon completion of the investigation you will receive an email with the results. We will not provide subscriber information unless presented with a valid court order.

Mailing Policy and Limits

Limits

There is a 200 hourly email limit per domain. This limit is also applied towards mailman and any web based scripts that send email on behalf of your First Capital Hosting-hosted account. If you send over this amount in any hour most of the emails will bounce back with a undeliverable error.

First Capital Hosting servers have a 60 pop checks per hour limit per hosted domain. If you excede this limit, you are likely to get a wrong password error message indicating that your login information is incorrect. If this occurs, simple wait an hour and your pop connection will automatically be reset. To prevent this from happening in the future, ensure that your email program is not set to check for new email messages less than every 10 minutes.

Mailing Lists Rules

1. Anytime you are sending an email message to a mailing list, no matter how large the list, you must throttle it. We recommend you throttle it to at the very least sending 1 email every 6 seconds. If the mailing list software you're using does not allow you to throttle you must use another program to send your messages. We recommend using PHPList which can be installed from within each customer's cPanel using the Fantastico installer. If you do not throttle and you try sending let's say 500 emails the server will try sending all 500 in 1 second which is not possible. This will cause the server load to go very high and for the entire server to be sluggish until this process is completed. It is our job to keep the server up and running without being sluggish. Anyone who causes the servers load to go high will be suspended and the process will be terminated. If you choose not to throttle you will most likely be suspended for overloading the server.

2. Any mailing list over 900 emails is only allowed to be sent to during off-peak times to prevent high server loads. Off peak times qualify as all day Saturday and Sunday, and 1am - 7 am eastern time M-F.

3. You are not allowed to mail to a mailing list you were given or purchased. This is spamming because they never agreed to you personally sending them mail. We do not care how you justify it. This is spam and will result in termination of the offending account.

4. Any unsolicited e-mail being sent will result in termination of the offending account. We take a zero tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited e-mail.

5. Any mailling list MUST comply with all guidelines set forth by the United States.
These can be found at: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.htm

6. No Direct SMTP mailers are allowed. An example of this is DarkMailer. Any mail should be relayed through the local MTA (localhost:25) for further delivery by the server and not done directly by scripts.

Last updated: September 26, 2007

PayPal - MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover accepted