"Unlimited" Usage Policy
"Unlimited" usage policy and definitions pertain to certain shared or web hosting accounts that may be offered.
Disk space, bandwidth and data transfer
Hosting for Africa Customers now have access to unlimited disk space, bandwidth and data transfer. Essentially then, you can use whatever disk space and bandwidth is necessary for your web hosting needs. On the majority of Hosting for Africa shared and reseller web hosting plans, there is no upward limit on the amount of resources a single customer may use with respect to their web hosting. Subject to these terms, Hosting for Africa makes every reasonable commercial effort to provide its customers with the storage, bandwidth, and data transfer resources required to power their websites, as long as the customer’s use of Hosting for Africa’s services abides with our Terms of Service. Our goal is provide the resources you require for a typical website that may experience periods of growth, which may result in increasing demands for resources (such as disk space storage or data transfer) without being subject to additional hosting charges.
What is acceptable and appropriate usage?
Hosting for Africa web hosting is continually investing in technology and support features. Our web hosting solution has specifically been designed to serve the web hosting needs of small and independently owned and operated businesses and organizations throughout the world. Since you will be hosting your website with hundreds of others on our servers in a virtual community, our offerings are really not intended to support enterprise level or large company requirements. For that, we recommend purchasing at least a virtual private server or dedicated server solution.
Hosting for Africa web hosting is a shared web hosting service, which ultimately means a number of customers' websites are hosted within the same server environment. To ensure that our hosting is first-class, reliable, and available to all customers within that server community, an individual customer's website usage cannot adversely affect the performance of other customers' sites. We monitor our servers 24/7/365 and in no way can one customer adversely affect the performance of that server. If this happens, we will take preventative measures to ensure that the entire community is protected.
Lastly, our web hosting service is intended to host websites, not backup or storage facility for users' data. Using your web hosting account primarily as an online storage space for archiving electronic files and images is strictly prohibited. Our servers are for web hosting usage only.
What is unlimited?
- Unlimited disk space: Create a website as large as you like, hundreds or thousands of web pages; you will not be penalized for exceeding any upper or ceiling limit. However, please realize that there are many other users on your server and growing a website very large too fast will impede the performance of that server, as using too many server resources will negatively impact other customers on that server. We will place some constraints on how fast you can grow that website and monitor the server resources closely. The vast majority of our customers' sites grow at rates well within our rules, however, and will not be impacted.
The use of more than two hundred and fifty thousand (250,000) inodes on any shared or reseller account may result in a warning, and if no action is taken to reduce the excessive use of inodes, your account may be suspended. If an account exceeds one hundred thousand (100,000) inodes or five gigabytes (5GB), whichever is reached first, it will be automatically removed from our off-site backup system to avoid over-usage, however, you can purchase an account off-site backup add-on. Every file (i.e. a webpage, image file, email, etc.) on your account uses up one (1) inode.
User accounts that constantly create and delete large numbers of files on a regular basis, have hundreds of thousands of files, or cause file system damage may be flagged for review and/or suspension. The primary cause of excessive inodes is typically due to Users leaving their catchall address enabled, but never checking their primary account mailbox. Over time, tens of thousands of messages (or more) build up, eventually pushing the account past an acceptable amount of inodes. To disable your default mailbox, login to cPanel and choose "Mail", then "Default Address", "Set Default Address", and then type in: ":fail: No such user here".
- Unlimited bandwidth and data transfer: Hosting for Africa does not set limits on the amount of visitor traffic a website can receive or on the amount of content a customer can upload to their website in any given month. Hosting for Africa’s bandwidth and data transfer charges are all inclusive; there are no additional fees based on increased use of bandwidth, so long as the customer abides by the Terms of Service. This rule only comes into play when you use excess server processing power that negatively impacts the performance of the server and provides a bad customer experience in that server community. Minimizing the impact on an individual server's processing power is key to the overall performance on that server. In the vast majority of cases, if you use the web hosting service appropriately, visitors to your website will be able to view, download, and add as much content from your site as they wish. However, in certain circumstances, our server processing power, server memory, or anti-abuse controls could limit downloads or access from your site. Violators to the above rule will not be tolerated. You can upload all the content that you require each month subject to the rules as outlined above.
- Unlimited hosting space but excessive MySQL files: On most Hosting for Africa shared and reseller plans, we do not set limits on the amount of disk space or data transfer allowed for an individual customer account, nor do we charge additional fees based on an increased amount of usage, so long as the customer is compliant with our Terms of Service. However, Hosting for Africa’s services are designed to host websites and as such, we DO NOT provide unlimited space for online storage, backups, or the archiving of electronic files, documents, log files, etc., and such activity shall result in the termination of the customer’s account(s) without notice. Furthermore, accounts with an extraordinarily large number of files can have an adverse effect on server performance. This includes, but is not limited to, accounts with an excessive number of MySQL/PostgreSQL tables, or of a database size that may negatively impact the performance of our servers. Hosting for Africa may request that the number of files/nodes, database tables or total database usage be reduced to ensure proper performance for all customers on that server, or we may terminate the customers account, with our without notice.
For more specific terms of service, we ask that you refer to our Acceptable Use Policy.