West Coast Online Terms and Agreements

WCO's Terms and Conditions for Service

WCO's goal is to provide as unrestricted and satisfying an Internet experience as possible for our customers. These common rules are designed to satisfy what the law demands, to protect WCO, and to protect our customers. These terms and conditions are similar to what you would find at any quality ISP, and are the general guidelines the Internet community tends to deem as good 'netiquette'. These Terms and Conditions apply to all West Coast Online customers, from personal dialup accounts to T3 HICAP clients.

WCO reserves the right to modify these terms and conditions without prior notice at any time. Please bookmark this page and visit this location at least once a month. We will attempt to notify all our customers by email when our Terms and Conditions change.

Enforcement of Terms and Conditions
Depending upon the circumstances of any violation of our Terms and Conditions (including any actions that cause damage, downtime, excessive load, or harm to people or systems) we may issue a warning, suspend your service, or terminate your account - without notice or refund. (And if appropriate, we bill/collect our fee of $ 300 per-hour (plus any expenses to collect) to repair malicious damage caused by mail-bombing, hacking or attempting to damage our system, or other networks via our system.)

Illegal activities
We are required by law to report any criminal activity that we become aware of.
Be aware that if it comes to our attention that you are using our system to commit illegal acts (e.g., storing or transporting commercial software via our system illegally) we must immediately suspend/terminate your service.
We support your right to free speech, but can't support your use of our service to harm, abuse, harass, or libel others. By use of our service, you indemnify WCO from any damages resulting from your actions or the content you store on our systems. However, if our attorneys believe WCO will likely be held liable for your content (e.g., libel/harassment) hosted on our system, and you refuse to fix the problem, WCO may terminate your account.
Harassment and privacy
Your account and business is private with us - we do not sell mailing lists and generally do not share your private information. We ask you to do the same:
Do not snoop or disturb other users' files or directories. You may not harass or threaten any of our staff or other customers. You may not make public any private email, or provide any of our system files to other persons on the Internet. You may not harass or make threats against another person via email or news, web, or any other electronic media/service we make available. Nor may you impersonate another person. You may not wear a 'big nose and glasses' mask while posting to ba.internet.
Spamming
Spamming is not tolerated at WCO. "Spamming" is sending unsolicited email - whether "mass" or ostensibly targetted - to people who have not asked for such email. Spam is also posting to Usenet news a single cross-post to many newsgroups, or many individual posts to multiple newsgroups that are not related to the topic of your article, or where doing so is in violation of a group's charter or common use. Posting identical or nearly identical usenet posts on a regular (daily, weekly) basis - with the exception of FAQ's and other informational content posts - is similarly prohibited. Spam sent via other networks, but referencing email addresses or websites at WCO is similarly prohibited. You may not use WCO as a 'drop off' address for replies to spam mail or spam posts sent from other networks. We encourage the appropriate use of email and usenet news, and we do not censor for content. We will censor those users who annoy vast numbers of innocent people on the net who do not wish to be bothered with unsolicited materials. Downstream WCO commercial customers: Regardless of your connectivity to WCO - be it 56k or DS3 - you are bound by these same restrictions. If you or your customers spam, you risk loss of connectivity until the problem is mitigated.
Denial of service attacks
You may not mount an attack against our system or any other. This includes mail bombing, "hacking" or attempting to gain root access, tsunami or flood bots or annoyance utilities like "nuke" or "flash", employing packet sniffers, flood pings, etc.
Telneting in to Shell
You may telnet in a reasonable number of concurrent sessions. Note however that simultaneous telnet sessions originating from multiple disjoint networks will be assumed to indicate that the user's password has been compromised or shared. We reserve the right to restrict access until we can determine whether or not the account has been breached.
Technical support
We at WCO are proud of our technical support staff. To maintain the high quality of technical support our customers expect, we must limit the availability of telephone tech support to the primary account holder. We cannot provide tech support for other persons whom you may authorize to use your account, such as your wife, brother, business partners, etc..
Similarly, we must limit tech support to issues related to connectivity only. We cannot teach you how to design your web pages, how to write perl scripts, how to compile code, etc.. We can only offer such help on a consultancy basis, or we may refer you to other specialists. However, we may (and frequently do) - at our discretion and time permitting - assist customer with non-connectivity issues. Providing such additional service shall not be construed to mean that WCO is obligated to provide such service.
Payment and billing
Monthly charges accrue from the time you sign up until the time you formally cancel with written notice via email, postal mail, or fax to WCO. Much like having to pay for a rented movie even if you don't watch it, you must pay for your Internet access ability even if you don't log in and use it. If you are not going to use your account for an extended period (14 days, minimum), you must notify WCO in advance to avoid paying for that interval. All WCO prices can change without notice at any time. For more details about our dialup or financial/billing policies, visit the Customer Support section of this web site, under Billing Issues.
All startup fees and equipment sales must be paid for in advance, before equipment is shipped or circuits are activated.
Extra charges and fees
WCO reserves the right to charge (and collect) for additional expenses incurred. Some services are optional and provided at a nominal charge. Listed below are rates for these services: (Add travel time to all hourly rates where appropriate. All hourly rates 1/2 hour minimum.)

Changes to existing Domain Name information - $ 10
Changing WCO login name - $ 10
Excessive and unnecessary pager activation fee - $ 50 per occurrence.
Per-hour fee for technician-level support (e.g., billing research, web consulting, training, debugging scripts/code/configurations, etc.) - $ 85
Per-hour fee for engineering-level support (e.g., router configuration, telco problem resolution, Sr. Sysadmin issues, research on collection issues, harassment, banking, investment, marketing,
design, or legal matters) - $ 300

Late payment fee/Credit card dispute fee - $ 10
Returned check fee - $ 15
Declined credit card fee: $ 5.05
Re-connection fee (re-activate payment restricted account) - 50 percent of monthly charge.
Per-hour fee to research/prepare/collect/process defaulted debts - $ 85
Excessive and unnecessary billing changes - $ 15 per occurrence.
Domain name billing issues:
Any domain hosted at WCO must have an Internet account at WCO to support it - one domain per account. WCO charges $40 for moving, registering, or deleting a domain name. Unless you are running your own domain name server, all Domain Name Registrations MUST be done by WCO staff. We insist on processing any and all DNS requests that reside on our servers. (Our Business and commercial account customers get one free domain action per account. WCO does not charge fees on behalf of the Internic - Internic charges (and domain ownership issues) are always the responsibility of the customer.
All domains hosted by WCO or using our DNS servers, are kept at WCO until the customer has paid all past debts to WCO. We will not process any request to move any domain for any customer having a past-due amount owed to WCO; and we reserve the right to wait for the check/payment to clear the bank before releasing the domain. Similarly, we cannot move domains to WCO from other ISPs in cases where unpaid debts to the former ISP are a problem.
Dialup usage
WCO's dialup accounts are flat-rate for normal and reasonable usage. While we allow family/business users to share one account (using one modem per account), the total connect time per Personal Dialup account must be less than 300 hours in any given month (equivalent to 10 hours of connect time each and every day of the month.)
For our Business Dialup accounts, connect time up to 400 hours per month is allowed.
We enforce these limits to ensure that all of our customers will have equal access to the connection they are paying for. The vast majority of our customers will never reach these limits. Customers exceeding these limits will be issued a warning, and if usage persists above these limits, the customer will be billed at the next higher rate tier (personal account billed at business account rate, business account billed at dedicated account rate).
With the exception of dedicated dialup accounts, extended interval sessions (6 hours +) that are either idle, or running only automated functions such as email checks, pings, etc., may be terminated.
Local Numbers
Make sure that any WCO-supplied telephone number is local to you!
WCO can not, and will not be held responsible for phone charges, whether due to our error, a telco error, or yours. Always check with your telephone company to insure a WCO number is local to you. WCO will not reimburse for telephone company expenses under any circumstance.
Concurrent dialups
Only one simultaneous dial-in per account. This means that you may not use more than one of WCO's modems at the same time. If you are found logged in more than once over a modem connection, we will assume that your password has been compromised and will immediately suspend your account. There are some circumstances when we may permit multiple dial-ins for business accounts.
Disk allotments
Customers are allocated twenty-five megabytes of disk space for their home directory/web space, ten megabytes for public ftp space, ten megabytes for email spool space. Usage in excess of any allotment is billable at fifty cents per daily average megabyte per month.
Emulators, IRCs, MUDs, and other servers
IRCbots or servers may not be run on WCO. Bots found running will be terminated, files associated with them may be deleted. Only one IRC session per user per session on the UNIX shell. Idle IRC sessions on the shell will be terminated. MUDs may not be hosted on our system.
The use of SLIP or PPP emulators on the UNIX shell is not allowed.
Bandwidth/CPU usage
You may make whatever material you like available for FTP or WWW as long as it is legal and it does not generate traffic in excess of 200 Megs per day (Personal accounts) or 400 Megs per day (Business accounts). For this reason, we strongly recommend that our customers avoid storing any adult-oriented materials here. If your Internet site suddenly sucks giant amounts of bandwidth, we retain the right to restrict access to it for such interval as we deem necessary to maintain availability of bandwidth for all users. Similarly, your actions/processes may not consume an unreasonable amount of system resources/CPU cycles.
Network availability
WCO's uptime record is second to none, and when a part of our system (or yours) is down, it is usually because of a telco's error or failed equipment. We can not refund for temporary service outages, no matter what the cause.
Backup of data
Not a rule, but another topic involving common sense - Backups.
WCO performs regular, scheduled backups, but nothing in this world is failsafe. If you have something critical to your career or hobby, it makes sense to keep a copy of it locally on your own computer, in addition to ours. Our backups are designed for recovery from serious system failures - not for recovery of files accidentally or intentionally deleted by users. We may be able to restore files a user has deleted, but there are substantial charges associated with doing so.
Disclaimers
WCO disclaims any and all responsibility for the loss of, or damage to, any customer data stored on our system, or for any consequential damages related to such loss, damage, or unavailability. WCO's services are provided with no warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. In no event shall WCO be liable for incidental, consequential or special damages including, without limitation, loss of data or profits, regardless of whether WCO has been advised of the risk of such damages in advance. By using our services at any time, you unconditionally agree to indemnify and hold harmless WCO from and against loss, suit, damage or claim including reasonable attorney's fees.
Limitation of Service
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone at any time for any reason. In some cases, we may not be able to give advance notice.

Common sense is the best policy, try not to do things that could harm or annoy WCO, our customers, or the Internet.

This page last modified 6-22-97.