Acceptable Use Policy

Resources are valuable, and wasting resources is not permitted.

When you purchase service from Opus One, we place certain limits on what you can do. This includes limits on time as well as disk space. You will also be using resources which are more difficult to meter, including CPU, network bandwidth, and support personnel. We allocate our resources to support the level of service you have purchased and we price our service accordingly. If you make very heavy and unusual demands on our resources out of line with the service you have requested, we reserve the right to either charge you for those resources, limit your use of resources, or terminate your account.

The Internet has a culture which must be respected.

Most clients of Opus One are using our services for access to the Internet. We expect you to follow the norms of the Internet in your usage. This means that your use of electronic mail, news servers, and other Internet services should match the intended use of these services. A prime example of uses which are NOT allowed would include widespread posting of advertisements or other bulletins to newsgroups or mailing lists not in accordance with their charter (usually called spam) or directly sending unsolicited email to large numbers of users. Abuses of external resources, such as newsgroups and mailing lists, are grounds for termination of your account.

What you do on our systems is your own business.

We are not interested in prying into your affairs nor in acting as policemen should you accidentally or intentionally offend some other Internet user. You have a reasonable expectation of privacy and autonomy and we will make our best effort to meet your expectations.

Things which are illegal in other contexts are not legal on the Internet.

Many kinds of activities are illegal in Arizona. If it is brought to our attention that you are participating in some illegal activity using our systems, we reserve the right to suspend your account until the matter can be worked out. If we are asked to provide private information about you to officials bearing warrants, we are not going to go to jail to protect your files or electronic mail.

Publicly available information should not be obscene.

This policy applies to anyone making available information for public consumption, such as WWW pages or Anonymous FTP files. We have no political, moral, or ethical objections to your using our systems to promote your point of view---within reason. However, we ask that you not use our systems to openly disseminate material which would violate community standards of decency. If you make such material publicly available, then we reserve the right to protect such material from public access until the matter can be worked out.

Further, although we recognize your First Amendment right to freedom of expression, we are not obligated to provide a platform for you to express your views. If you use our systems, even privately, to promote or organize hate crimes and we find out about it, we will ask you to take your business elsewhere.

Our network and systems are designed to be available.

Within the budget we have available, we have made our best effort at providing spare and redundant systems. We do make periodic backups of all data on disk as a precaution against hardware failure. However, there are single points of failure which could take us (and you) off the Internet or off the telephone network for an extended period of time. We will not be held liable for any loss you suffer because of system failure on our end, either through acts of God or stupid negligence on our part. If you have a truly non-stop application which must be available at all times or suffer dire business consequences, you should not be using our services. If our systems are unexpectedly unavailable for a period of 12 hours or longer, we will refund any fees you have paid for the month in which the outage occurs.

The Internet is an inherently unreliable network.

Because the Internet is not guaranteed to offer connectivity between any two points at any time, we want you to understand that any Internet outage outside of our premises is not considered a system outage.

We expect to be paid on time.

Payment for services is due when invoiced, normally for 1 month in advance, unless other arrangements are made. Invoices not paid after 30 days will have late fees and/or interest added. If your account is 90 days or more in arrears, we reserve the right to cancel your service and remove your files, including e-mail which has not yet been delivered.

You must stand by your service commitment.

It is common for clients to negotiate discounts for services based on volume, prepayment, or longevity of service. If you have negotiated such a discount, you must stand by the terms of your agreement. If you choose to cancel service early or otherwise breach your agreement, you will be responsible for the full retail price of the service you have used, along with any installation fees.