Go2Cloud's cloud services terms of service

Fine print?

Everybody hates it!

Rather than hide our terms of service away behind a tiny link that you can never find, or trick you into signing a binding contract by hiding it behind a tick box and an “I agree” button, we decided to be 100% upfront about it.

Let’s get on the same page. Here are our terms of service:

This Agreement

These terms of service (the “Terms of Service”) apply to you, a customer of Go2Cloud (Pty) Ltd. In what follows, “we” or “us” refers to Go2Cloud (Pty) Ltd, “you” refers to the individual(s) or organisation(s) purchasing or using Go2Cloud services, and “services” refers to all services, products and accompanying services provided by Go2Cloud. In addition, “your users” refers to any third parties to whom you grant access to services running within or associated with your Go2Cloud account.

Go2Cloud is registered in South Africa, registration number 2011/003335/07. Our registered office and address for correspondence or any notices is

Stand 529, 1 Clifford Crescent, Midstream Estates, Gauteng, 0169. You can contact us and provide notices to us by email at business@go2cloud.co.za .

You must be at least 18 years old to purchase or use our services. If you aren’t 18, you should probably chat to your parents, sell them on the value of cloud, and get them to sign up for you. In addition to this, we reserve the right to refuse service to any person or company at our sole discretion.

What we do and what we are responsible for:

While we are sure you already know what we do, for the purposes of this agreement we have to tell you again (just so everyone is 100% clear).

We provide cloud services. That means any combination of infrastructure, platform and/or software as a service. In order for us to offer you a great experience, our team deploys, operates, and maintains the base infrastructure. Our service includes the provision of computing capacity on this infrastructure for you. In return for this service, you rent the capacity on our infrastructure, which you access exclusively over the internet. You will use this capacity to store data and/or to run virtual servers and applications.

Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings from Go2Cloud may be extended at any time. We reserve the right to provide this service to you as an end customer as well as to partners who may receive a rebate for their sales efforts or as a value added reseller (VAR). Partner agreements are managed by an addendum to this agreement and only offered at the discretion of Go2Cloud.

We work diligently when creating and compiling the content on our website, but make no warranty about the accuracy of the descriptions of our service on our website (with the exception of the Terms of Service). As a result, we do not accept any liability resulting from any reliance you or any third party may place on such descriptions. In particular, performance descriptions are indicative and not guaranteed. Our prices cannot be guaranteed for any period of time, although in the event that we wish to increase our prices, you will have the rights set out under the Suspension and Termination section below.

In terms of the Infrastructure and Platform as a Service solutions, we do not support any operating systems and/or other software which you run on your virtual servers. We do not make any representations, warranties or guarantees regarding data retention, data integrity, service security or service suitability for any purpose. Just because it’s in the cloud, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t back it up. Also, you must not use our services in any safety critical systems.

You rent capacity on our infrastructure either

by subscription, which is paid in advance, covering a certain amount of capacity over a given time period; or
by usage, which is deducted from a prepaid balance, and may be charged at a different rate from subscriptions; or
by payment in arrears, according to the payment terms specified in our invoices or otherwise.

You may not always be able to increase the amount of capacity that you use on our infrastructure, even when payment for this would be covered by your existing subscriptions or prepaid balance, since our infrastructure may be fully or nearly fully-utilised by other customers. We obviously strive to avoid this wherever possible.

We reserve the right to charge interest on any amount due to us from you, on a daily basis at 2% above the Reserve Bank of South Africa base rate. You will reimburse us all costs and expenses incurred in collection of overdue amounts, including our legal fees.

The accompanying services which we offer may be subject to additional terms and conditions from us or third parties, such as domain name registrars, who are involved in their provision. We will notify you of these conditions, which you must also accept should you wish to use these accompanying services.

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

We guarantee that your stored data and running virtual servers will be available over the internet for 100% of the time in any given calendar month, except for periods of unavailability due to:

Your payments not covering your use, including but not limited to when your subscriptions or prepaid balance run out.

Acts or omissions of you or your users.
Software running within your virtual servers.
Scheduled maintenance which we have announced at least 24 hours in advance.
Factors outside our control, including but not limited to any force majeure events; failures, acts or omissions of our upstream providers or failures of the internet.
Actions of third parties, including but not limited to security compromises, denial of service attacks and viruses.
Violations of our Acceptable Use Policy.
Law enforcement activity.

If we fail to meet the guarantee detailed above, you will be able to request a credit as detailed below, up to a maximum of 100% of your fee for capacity used during the previous 30 calendar days:

Credit of 10 times the fees for any period of unavailability lasting more than 15 minutes, measured from the time at which you validly inform us at gethelp@go2cloud.co.za of the unavailability or the time at which our monitoring systems detect the unavailability, whichever is earlier.

Credit of your entire fee for the previous 30 calendar days in case of permanent loss of your stored data.
In the event that we fail to meet the guarantee on more than one occasion within a period of 30 calendar days, then the credit that you may claim for any incident will be limited to the maximum of 100% of your fee for capacity used since the previous incident or 100% of your fee for capacity used during the previous 30 calendar days, whichever fee is lower.

To receive a credit, you must contact us at gethelp@go2cloud.co.za within 30 calendar days of the incident, specifying the start time, date and duration of the period of unavailability which forms the basis of your claim and the amount of credit claimed. We will be the sole arbiters regarding the award of credit and our decision will be final and binding. The award of credit by us to you as described in this SLA will be the sole and exclusive remedy for unavailability of stored data or virtual servers or loss of stored data. Credits will only be provided against future service and for the avoidance of doubt may not be exchanged for cash or other forms of payment.

Privacy Policy

We are committed to respecting and protecting the privacy of our customers. As our customer, you will provide us with contact and payment information. Contact information includes your name, email address, postal address and telephone number. Payment information includes your credit card number or other payment details. Your information will only be used to support your customer relationship with Go2Cloud, and will never be passed on to any third party unless this is necessary to provide services to you, or where we are legally required to do so.

You also store and transmit data using our services. Unless you give us explicit permission, we will never inspect your stored data and will only measure the volume of your transmitted data for billing purposes or inspect your transmitted data to investigate suspected violations of our Acceptable Use Policy. We will never disclose your data to any third party unless we are required to do so by court or administrative order.

Liability

Our liability under these Terms of Service will not exceed your bill for virtual server use in the calendar month in which the incident occurred, and you will make no claim against us unless you notify us of the details of the claim within one month of the incident occurring and one month prior to making the claim.

We will not be liable for any losses or liabilities that you may incur as a result of any force majeure event or law enforcement activity. A force majeure event in the Terms of Service is an event that is outside our control and will include but not be limited to fire, flood, earthquake, storm, hurricane or other natural disasters, war, invasion, act of foreign enemies, hostilities (whether war is declared or not), civil war, rebellion, revolution, insurrection, military or usurped power or confiscation, terrorist activities, nationalization, government sanction, blockage, embargo, labor dispute, strike, lockout or interruption or failure of electricity or other utilities.

With the exception of losses with regard to fraud on our part and personal injury, we will not be liable for any consequential losses which you or your users may suffer as a result of our breach of these Terms of Service, such losses including but not limited to economic loss, loss of goodwill or reputation, and loss of or damage to data.

Your Responsibilities

If you are a consumer then nothing in this agreement excludes any rights which you may have under the South African Consumer Protection Act (Act 68 of 2009). You are responsible in all respects for your use and your users’ use of our services.

Without limitation, this includes:

All data stored in your account or transmitted by your virtual servers.

Any operating systems and/or other software on your virtual servers.
Websites, email messages and other data transmitted by your virtual servers.
With regard to data protection laws, you are the data controller for all data stored in your account or transmitted by your virtual servers.
You are responsible for maintaining any required backup copies of data stored in your account. We do not make or maintain backup copies on your behalf.
You must receive and read all email sent to “postmaster” and “abuse” in every mail domain which you host on our infrastructure. We recommend that you also receive and read all email sent to “hostmaster” and “webmaster”.
You will not disclose your password or security key to third parties for any purpose. If your account or virtual servers are compromised by third parties, you must notify us immediately at gethelp@go2cloud.co.za and change any passwords and reinstall any software which may have been compromised. In the absence of such notification or manifest error, we will accept your security key as authority to make any changes to your account.

You must indemnify us and keep us indemnified from and against all claims, costs (including legal costs), damages, expenses, losses and liabilities incurred by us or due to third party claims against us as a result of, or in connection with your breach of any third party rights, including but not limited to any infringement of third party intellectual property rights.

Compliance with Law

You undertake that your and your users’ use of our services does not and will not violate any applicable laws, and that you will not permit any such violations by others. We are not responsible for any use which you or your users make of our services, nor any charges that you or your users may incur with a third party. You will indemnify us against any liability for any action that you undertake that does or may breach any applicable laws and any costs (including our legal fees and a commercially reasonable additional charge for our time), claims, damages, expenses, losses and liabilities resulting from such breach.

Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)

We do not permit the use of our services for actions or activities which, at our sole discretion, may be illegal, offensive, abusive or contrary to accepted internet norms, or threaten our infrastructure. We will take any actions necessary to enforce these prohibitions, including those listed under the Suspension and Termination section below. We prohibit all use of our services which appear to us, at our sole discretion, to be illegal under any applicable laws. This includes but is not limited to:

Storage or transfer of illegal material, including material which it is illegal to transmit over a public telecommunications network.
Involvement in fraudulent activities.
Misuse of our or other computer systems.

We prohibit use of our services which appear to us, at our sole discretion, to be offensive. This includes but is not limited to storing or transmitting any content or links to any content which we believe to be:

Excessively violent, inciting violence or threatening violence.
Harassing or inciting hate of any person or group of persons.
Violating the privacy of any person or group of persons.
Promoting or soliciting illegal activities under any applicable laws.
Exposing trade secrets, infringing copyright, trademarks or patents, or assisting others in doing so.
Unfair or deceptive under consumer protection laws.
Creating a risk to safety, health or national security.

We prohibit all use of our services which appear to us, at our sole discretion, to be abusive or contrary to accepted internet norms. This includes but is not limited to:

Sending unsolicited bulk/commercial email (spam).
Excessive posting on web forums, news groups, chat services, or IRC.
Publishing websites or other material which are advertised by techniques (including but not limited to spam) which we would classify as abuse if they were carried out via Go2Cloud.
Distribution of viruses, adware or other malware.
Fraudulent collection of personal or financial data (phishing).
Unauthorized access to or misuse of data, computer systems, or networks.
Unauthorized probing, scanning or testing the vulnerability of computer systems or networks.
Interference with service to other users of computer systems or networks, including denial of service attacks.
Unauthorized interception or monitoring of network traffic.
Transmitting fake or misleading network traffic, including forged IP packets or email headers.
Any conduct likely to result in retaliation against us, including engaging in behavior that results in a denial of service attack.

We prohibit all use of our services which appears to us, at our sole discretion, to threaten our infrastructure. This includes but is not limited to:

Usage which imposes excessive load beyond that expected from a typical server. For example, continuous high CPU or I/O use.

Virtual server configurations with inadequate security, allowing unauthorized third party access.
Attempts to circumvent our mechanisms for controlling, monitoring or billing usage.
You will ensure that all use of our services, whether by you or by any of your users, follows the Terms of Service. In addition, you will bind your users to an acceptable use policy containing all of the restrictions above.

Alteration of Terms of Service

The current version of the Terms of Service will be the version available on our website at https://www.go2cloud.co.za/. However, we reserve the right to alter the Terms of Service at any time. In the event that we alter the Terms of Service, you will have the rights set out under the Suspension and Termination section below.

Suspension, Termination and Refunds

You may terminate your account with us in the following situations:

In the event that we wish to alter the Terms of Service or increase our prices, we will notify you by email 30 calendar days before any alteration takes effect. Upon receipt of such notice, you will have the option either to terminate your account and receive a refund for the unused portion of your payments, or to continue subject to the altered Terms of Service or increased prices. If you do not notify us of your wish to terminate your account within 30 calendar days of receipt of such notice, you will be deemed to have accepted the altered Terms of Service or increased prices.
At any time, provided that you give us at least five business days’ notice (business days in the Terms of Service shall mean a day other than a Saturday or a Sunday on which banks are open for business in South Africa). We will not provide a refund for any unused payments unless you are a consumer as set out in the Consumer Protection Act and you notify us in writing at our correspondence address that you wish to cancel your agreement within the statutory cancellation period.

We may, at our sole discretion, immediately and without notice, terminate or suspend for a period of time all or part of our services to you, including deleting your stored data, in the following situations:

In the event that you or your users violate our Acceptable Use Policy, any other provision of the Terms of Service or any applicable laws. In the event of termination or suspension in this situation, you will not be entitled to any refund. In addition, we will have the right to recover from you any costs resulting from the violation, including our time which we and you agree will be charged at a rate of R4,800 per day and which we and you agree is a genuine pre-estimate and commercially reasonable; any legal fees that we incur; and a commercially reasonable additional charge for the violation itself.
In the event that your payments do not cover your use, including but not limited to when your subscriptions or prepaid balance run out, we may, at our sole discretion, terminate or suspend for a period of time all or part of our services to you, including deleting your stored data, where we have provided you with at least 30 calendar days’ notice. In the event of such termination or suspension, we will refund the unused portion of your payment. Since services are paid for on consumption, we therefore cannot offer refunds on services consumed. In keeping with best practices, we offer refunds on prepaid services not consumed if the request for termination is received in writing within 7 (seven) days of receiving the prepayment for services to be rendered. The onus is on the client to ensure that we have received the termination request.

Any cost(s), which we may have incurred directly or indirectly, are non-refundable. Such items include, but are not limited to, cloud processing resources, traffic volume, man hours, etc. Refunds will be made by electronic bank transfer to a legitimate bank account which may require advanced confirmation from the relevant financial services institution.

Notice

You will ensure that your email address, postal address and other contact details specified in your online account settings are kept up to date at all times, particularly as we will send critical correspondence to you at your email address. Where necessary you will act on any correspondence sent to you within three Business Days of when it is sent. In the absence of evidence of earlier receipt, a notice or other communication is deemed given: if sent by email at one hour after the email has been sent; if delivered by hand, at the time of delivery; if sent by post (other than air mail), at midday on the second Business Day after posting it.

Protection of Minors

Go2Cloud prohibits customers from using its service to harm or attempt to harm a minor, including, but not limited to: by hosting, possessing, disseminating, distributing or transmitting material that is unlawful, including child pornography.

Software Licensing

The customer is responsible for valid license agreements for all software which is installed on Go2Cloud servers. Certain Microsoft licenses can be purchased from Go2Cloud on a monthly subscription basis. These licenses are governed by the Microsoft Service Provider Use Rights (SPUR) agreement, and subscription to any of these licenses constitutes acceptance of both these Terms of Service and the Microsoft SPUR agreement.

Partnership

Partner companies of Go2Cloud may be appointed at the sole discretion of Go2Cloud. By the same token, partner status may be revoked at any time based on our discretion. Partnership is governed by a separate agreement directly between Go2Cloud and the Partner. Contact business@go2cloud.co.za for further information.

Governing Law and Jurisdiction

These Terms of Service and all other legal relationships between you and us will be governed by and construed in accordance with South African law. The courts of South Africa are to have exclusive jurisdiction to settle any dispute arising out of or in connection with these Terms of Service, and any proceedings will be brought in the South African courts. We and you irrevocably submit and agree to submit to the jurisdiction of the South African courts. We and you irrevocably waive any objection which we or you may at any time have to the South African courts being so nominated, and agree not to claim that the South African courts are not a convenient or appropriate forum.

The illegality, invalidity or unenforceability of a provision of the Terms of Service under the law of any jurisdiction does not affect: the legality, validity or enforceability of any other provision of the Terms of Service in that jurisdiction; or the legality, validity or enforceability of that or any other provision of the Terms of Service under the law of any other jurisdiction