Recent growth on the Internet has also brought about more and more possibilities for abuse of this new communications medium. In response to this, we have developed the following position on abuse of Internet services in order to protect you, our customer, from Internet harassment and intrusions of privacy. "Netiquette" is a term which has come to receive widespread use on the Internet. Netiquette is generally defined as the standards or practices an individual or organization engages in to engender responsible Internet citizenship on their behalf, as well as refraining from standards or practices which would impose undue financial, time, or social constraints on other users of the Internet.

The Internet, as large and complex as it is, has no single governing body. There is no Internet Management to complain to when things go wrong. Every facet of the Internet is overseen by those organizations (such as Hosting Solutions) whose networks are interconnected to form the Internet. This also means that every user of the Internet is responsible for their own behavior.

Because of this decentralized system of responsibility, the Internet, for all of it's phenomenal growth in recent years, still retains a sense of "community". Although many large, commercial entities have recently come online, most of the information on the Internet is made available through the efforts of good-hearted Internet citizens all around the world who have an honest desire to simply share information with other people.

Because the Internet is simply an interconnected set of smaller networks, each entity using the Internet retains some liability for the cost associated with traffic and storage. For example, a single posting to a single newsgroup takes storage space on the local news server, then must be transmitted to a few more servers, which store the information on their hard drives, retransmitting to a few more servers, etc. When the costs of the storage space and transmission are all factored together, a single newsgroup posting can cost the collective Internet thousands of dollars! There are similar costs associated with the bandwidth required to transmit email. Therefore, someone using email or news postings for abusive purposes can have a large financial impact on the networks involved.

Aside from the financial costs, someone who has fallen victim to some sort of Internet abuse has other costs in terms of decreased effectiveness of the Internet. For example, someone besieged by SPAM or UCE email (a massive bulk email message to subscribers who did not indicate any desire to receive such email) spends additional time downloading and responding to email which was never wanted in the first place. A newsgroup subscriber may see their favorite newsgroup overrun with meaningless off-topic advertisements, obscuring any effective information still remaining in that newsgroup.

When a Hosting Solutions customer performs one of these abusive activities, Hosting Solutions pays a price as well. The additional time we have to spend responding to the complaints that pour in could be much better served doing other tasks here. Complaints do indeed pour in. If the domain "dollar-web.net" or "hostingsolutions.net" appears anywhere in the email headers, we will get complaints. Even if someone is using the services of another ISP to send out SPAM or UCE advertising their Hosting Solutions web site, we will get complaints. In particularly egregious incidents, angry Internet users have been known to "mail bomb" ISPs and IPPs by setting up programs to send so much email that the ISP's mail server crashes, denying email access to every customer of the ISP or IPP. Our system is robust enough to escape most of this type of activity, but you can see that in a case like this, the effect would be that of one rogue user spoiling the party for everyone. Although we do not allow any SPAM being sent utilizing our system, we also take a very poor look at any person that sends us complaints that are forged, altered, or un-related to Hosting Solutions services. Any complaintant that causes our services to be interrupted in any way, shape, or form, will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

There are literally thousands of advertising and marketing resources that are effective and either low, or no cost. These include classifieds on every one of the thousands of malls on the Internet, your Hosting Solutions web space, registering with search engines, appropriate USENET posting. and many more that are totally appropriate. We are not saying you can't advertise on the Internet. All we are saying is that we will cancel the account of any subscriber who advertises inappropriately; primarily meaning unsolicited mass mailings (SPAM and UCE), and spamming the USENET.

We're aware of the many ways that someone can hide their identity on the Internet, and rest assured that a person's access would not be terminated until we are sure that they indeed are responsible for the abuse that appears to be coming from them. Hopefully this policy should answer all of the questions of existing and new subscribers.

Should you violate Hosting Solutions's SPAM Policies, you WILL be charged $125 per hour for the time it takes us to "clean-up" your SPAM. This shall include but not be limited to the time required to answer mail from angry recipients of your SPAM and/or repair of a damaged server due to the "Mail Bombing" or other actions of the angry recipients in retaliation of your SPAM. You will also be charged $10 per gigabyte of data transfer that your SPAM incurred, including bandwidth used by answers to or complaints about your SPAM. We will invoice this amount or charge it to your credit card on file with us, and should it not be paid, we will take action against you in court, and/or we will contact a collection agency to recover the funds. Please note also that it is may now considered a crime to send UCE (unsolicited commercial e-mail) as it falls into the category of "junk faxes." Hosting Solutions will, upon request by appropriate local /state /federal /international officials, turn over names and personal information of any person who violates this policy.

If you know of any Hosting Solutions client that is or might be violating this policy, please send a message or, if possible, forward the SPAM or UCE in full (including headers) to abuse@hostingsolutions.net