Fair Use Policy
A Fair Use policy is designed to ensure that every customer receives a fast and reliable service. It applies just as much to support as it does to hosting. If all users conform to the Fair Use Policy, then no customer should be affected by the behaviour of other customers. This policy is designed to ensure that one customer does not use a significant proportion of the available resources on any given system and so degrade the service for others who are intended to share the same system. We divide systems between customers primarily by the allocation of disk space. The proportion of a resource that could reasonably be considered to be fair use is
therefore dictated by the amount of hosting space that is allocated to a given customer on our systems. The most obvious fair use case is in relation to bandwidth on our shared hosting services or on any of our other services where bandwidth is not specifically mentioned, such as email. In most cases, customers should simply not worry about their bandwidth usage as in the normal course of events, the vast majority never get anywhere near fair use limits. This approach allows us flexibility, leeway and discretion in our monitoring and approach to the use of resources. Having the flexibility is important both for customers and for Net2Air because a
customer may have ‘excessive’ traffic during one month of the year but be very quiet for the rest of the year. Through our fair use policy, we can monitor their usage, understand how the excess arises and use our discretion to disregard the odd month of very high usage if the usage subsequently returns to their usual ‘low’ level during the following month. This is quite a common pattern with customers who conduct business relating to sporting or musical events for example. If a customer starts to consistently exceed the fair use limits, then we’ll review the situation with them in order to either increase their allocated resources or to help them contain their usage so that it returns to be again within the fair use limits. The objective here is to ensure that customers who pay for a proportion of our overall resources are not disadvantaged by others seeking to take undue advantage.
Shared Hosting Bandwidth
As mentioned above, we calculate fair use bandwidth based on the amount of storage booked by the customer. So we allow routinely, 1GB of data per month per 100MB of data storage.
Support – Fair Use
Most of our customers are regular IT users and not IT experts. Given that, we don’t expect them all to understand the ins and outs of internet hosting or internet servers. In practical terms, this means that we expect to have to provide some support at the beginning of a new hosting setup in order to help them get started with their hosting. Naturally, some of this initial support will be only tangential to hosting and could be considered to be more like consultancy or training. Topics such as setting up email, basic questions about search engines and perhaps about web design may arise. Business support type questions, perhaps to do with home network troubleshooting, broadband and/or telecoms support come up, for all of customers would have to pay for elsewhere.
As you would expect, we log all support calls. With our years of experience in this area, we find that for the majority of customers, half-an-hour’s worth of support is enough to get them up and running. So, if a customer gets more than half-an-hour’s support in any given year, we reserve the right to charge for the excess use of the support service. We warn any customer to whom this policy might apply. This may sound unfair, but it is the only way that we can keep hosting prices down to all customers. Without such a policy in place, we would have to raise hosting prices to all customers which would penalise all concerned.
If any of this is unclear, please do get in touch and we will do our best to clarify it for you.
Thank you for choosing Net2Air!
Net2Air – August 2013
