Free Website Hosting Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy

ELIGIBILITY

Free hosting accounts are granted on a case-by-case, at-will basis for the purpose of providing a visible online web site presence for non-profit community service groups and people/causes that do not have a web page or web presence and would not otherwise have the means to do so.

This means if you have a free hosting account, you must actually use the account for a web site with real web content related to the purpose you specified when applying for free hosting, and the site must be functioning and visible in a browser as web content to the public.

In order to be eligible for free hosting, the domain registration must reside at 12Wonder.

Free hosting accounts are restricted to a lifetime limit of no more than 1 (one) free hosting account* per non-profit group/organization and/or a lifetime limit of no more than 3 (three) free web hosting accounts granted per web designer or web design company.

* If you have a Free Hosting account and wish to try out an upgrade to paid hosting but are afraid of losing your eligibility for free hosting by giving it up, don't worry: After upgrading from Free Hosting to a paid hosting package for the first time, you will have up to 6 (six) months to change your mind about paid hosting and reclaim eligibility for your free hosting account, as long as your hosting remains at 12Wonder and in good standing during those 6 months. Just submit a Helpdesk ticket about it. Please note this 6 month grace period only applies to the first time you upgrade from free hosting to paid hosting. Also, if you are not certain about whether you will wish to keep paid hosting, we suggest you select a short billing cycle e.g. monthly, as there are no refunds for unused paid hosting.

Other web hosting companies, web hosting providers, and web hosting resellers are not eligible for 12Wonder Free Web Hosting. 12Wonder Free Web Hosting packages may not under any circumstances be sold or resold to any person, organization, or entity. 12Wonder reserves sole discretion and retains the right to refuse for any reason any application for a Free Web Hosting Package.

AUTOMATIC RENEWAL

Many Free Hosting users have maintained free hosting accounts with us for more than 10 years. For as long as we are able to continue offering free hosting, any Free Hosting account will continue to renew automatically each month indefinitely as long as it remains in compliance with all Terms and Policies.

PROHIBITED USES OF FREE HOSTING

No portion of any free hosting account may be used for any of these purposes:

• Parking or redirecting a domain to any other site.
• As a doorway page to any other website hosted elsewhere.
• As an extra web presence for a person or organization which has another web presence elsewhere;
• As primarily online storage of downloads, documents, or forms which are not also readily visible as web pages in a browser as part of the hosted site;
• For displaying a duplicate of a web site or page which is on another web site;
• For displaying part of a web site while any portion of the person or organization's web site is on another web site (such as using a free hosting account only for some pages while other pages, documents, forums, forms, calendars, schedulers, blogs, photos, scripts, apps, or other elements of the web site reside on a different website or server, or are hosted elsewhere);
• As primarily a "link holder" for links to other site/s;
• As part of a link farm.
• Nor may any free hosting site be entirely or mostly password-protected so that there is little or no content visible to the public.

Additionally, a free web hosting account may not take advantage of hosting functions such as web scripts, web applications, or email without simultaneously having an active, visible, working web site online.

Use of free hosting for part of the site while using another server elsewhere for other site functions by DNS manipulation of MX, CNAME, A, and other records is also prohibited. The entire site and all related functions must be hosted in the same hosting account, or upgraded to paid hosting.

FREE HOSTING LINK REQUIREMENT

A small but visible active and working text link to the 12Wonder home page must appear on at least three top-level pages of any web site hosted under the 12Wonder Free Web Hosting Package plan. If there are three or fewer pages of the website, the link must appear on every page. The link on each page should look like this:

This must be a text link. Text colors and link colors may be changed if desired, but the wording, link title attribute, and link itself must remain intact and must be visible and readable. You may not replace the text link with an image or anything else, nor may you change or modify the link wording or the link URL in any way. The link does not have to be in bold font unless you want to make it so. You can get the code here.

NONCOMPETE

A web site which has been granted free hosting by 12Wonder under the terms of the Free Hosting accounts may not advertise or link to companies, entities, or individuals other than 12Wonder which offer web hosting and/or domain registration services. This includes advertisements, banners, and links to such sites placed either visibly or invisibly on the free hosting recipient's web pages, nor may such advertisements or links to competing entities be in any way hidden in the source code of the non-profit's web site's pages.

You may place links to other, noncompeting web sites (for example to helpful resources, etc.) on free hosted sites if the links are otherwise in compliance with the above, as well as the General Hosting TOS/AUP and other Free Web Hosting TOS/AUP.

OBFUSCATION OR ENCRYPTION

No free hosted site may utilize obfuscation or encryption technology to obfuscate, camouflage, encrypt, or otherwise hide any part of the code for files contained in the account.

SERVER RESOURCE USAGE

Any Free Web Hosting Package web site that uses a higher amount of server resources than its Package amount (such as, but not limited to, CPU resources, memory usage, and network resources over their allotted limits) will be given the option to either reduce the resources used to an acceptable level, or upgrade its hosting service plan to one of our paid Packages. If upgrading to a paid Package Plan, since the web site in question will have become a regular paid account it therefore will no longer be required to feature the "Free web hosting by 12Wonder" link.

INACTIVE/UNUSED FREE WEB HOSTING ACCOUNTS

Any free hosting account that is observed by us to be unused or inactive on our servers and name servers by one month after the account's creation will be automatically terminated without notice in order to clear resources on the server for active accounts. "Unused" applies to web sites for which a domain name does not exist or is expired, or the domain's DNS is not fully pointed to our nameservers, or for which no real home page or content is visible for the site at the top level of the domain (http://yournewsitename.com/ ). A parking-type page, or "Under Construction", "Coming Soon" or similar, or a page with title or logo only but without actual text content or functioning links is not considered to be an active, working "home page".

Additionally, if a formerly-active free hosting site contains information that is obviously outdated by 6 months or more, it will be considered to be an inactive site.

If the domain associated with a hosting account is allowed to expire, the free hosting account can no longer function and will be considered to be an inactive account, subject to immediate termination.

Any free hosting account which is terminated for being unused or inactive will not be eligible for free hosting again.

PURPOSE

If your application for free hosting was accepted, your web site's focus and purpose must remain as you specified on your application. If we find out after granting a free hosting account that the purpose of the web site or any page on it has "morphed" into something unrelated to what was specified in the application, or that the free hosting account was obtained under false pretenses, you will be given the opportunity to upgrade to a paid hosting account, or the hosting account will be terminated.

DOMAIN REGISTRATION

Every hosting account requires a top-level domain name to function (e.g. yournewsitename.com). Domain name registration is not included with hosting accounts whether free or paid (except for occasional limited-time offers). In order to be eligible for Free hosting, the associated domain must be registered at 12Wonder. After approval of a new free hosting application, if a domain is registered elsewhere, the applicant will have 7 days to successfully complete transfer of the domain registration to our registry. If transfer cannot be completed within 7 days, the applicant will then have another 24 hours to upgrade to paid hosting and change name servers on the domain at its current registrar to work with the paid hosting account, or the hosting account will be permanently terminated/deleted.

Any free hosting account whose domain is transferred away from our registry will immediately become ineligible for free hosting, and the free hosting account will be terminated immediately upon our becoming aware of the transfer away.

FREE HOSTING FEATURES

Features included in the Free hosting accounts are listed on the Free Hosting details page. Free hosting account features, limits, and quotas cannot be modified. If more space, bandwidth, or features such as email accounts or forwarding, MySQL databases etc. are desired, the account must be upgraded to paid hosting.

SUPPORT

While 12Wonder will make every effort to provide technical support during regular business hours for free hosting accounts, support to any free hosting account will be on a time-permitting, as-available basis. Priority 24-7 hosting support is reserved for paid hosting accounts since they pay the bills and keep 12Wonder in business, enabling us to provide free hosting at all. If you are inexperienced and believe you may need high-priority support regarding web hosting issues or questions, we strongly urge you to consider one of our paid hosting accounts instead. All paid web hosting accounts do include free top-priority web hosting-related support. Upgrades will not disturb the existing site or cause any downtime.

REPUTATION

Free web hosting is a privilege, not a right. Nobody is automatically entitled to free hosting at 12Wonder. Any free hosting account holder which does anything to endanger the reputation of 12Wonder while using our free hosting is subject to immediate and permanent termination without notice.

COMPLIANCE WITH FREE HOSTING TOS/AUP

We do frequently monitor all hosting accounts for compliance with all TOS/AUP (Terms of Service/Acceptable Use Policy), including compliance with free hosting link requirement, domain registration requirement, site activity, and site content. Noncompliance with any of the TOS/AUP by Free Hosting sites may result in immediate termination of the hosting account.  If a hosting account is terminated for any reason, this means the entire hosting account is permanently deleted from the server. Any free hosting account which is terminated for violating TOS/AUP will not be eligible in future for free hosting at 12Wonder.

VOLUNTARY CANCELLATION

If at any time after applying for and being granted a Free Hosting Account at 12Wonder, your or your organization decides to switch to another web host or another domain registrar, please do us the courtesy of requesting cancellation or at least notifying us of the move, so that we may delete the free account from the server to clear out space and resources for other accounts. Any Free Hosting account, user, or group which voluntarily discontinues or transfers the hosting or domain registration to a different host/registrar, without the courtesy of a notification to us will not be eligible for free hosting at 12Wonder in future.