Respecting TOS, help

[erroring]

Originally Posted by Early Out

That's precisely the problem with linking to Rapidshare, which has been a haven for copyright violators. BH will, in fact, suspend your account if your site is linking to Rapidshare. Don't do it.

is it "Unwritten" TOS? ok we must respect TOS, even if part of it not writen anywhere.
is there any more site that we should'nt link them?

[Early Out]

The terms of service prohibit you from hosting copyrighted material. Putting links on your website to a place that specializes in pirated material doesn't get you off the hook. You're still providing people with a direct way of accessing copyrighted material. It's sort of like being the driver of the getaway car at a bank robbery - you're still guilty of robbing the bank, even though you never set foot in the place.

[felgall]

Originally Posted by erroring

is there any more site that we should'nt link them?

Just don't link to any content which if hosted on BlueHost would violate the terms of service. It doesn't matter where the violating content is, if you are making it available from a site on BlueHost you are violating the TOS.

[erroring]

thanks for response. but sites like rapidshare is like knife u can use it for surgery operation to heal some one or u can use it to kill some one. and if u think some body is baby or Dolt and foolish never let him use knife or doesnt give it to him. as we known customers aren't baby, so what BH thinks about his customers?

[Early Out]

BH can't allow its customers to use its hosting service for any purpose that could generate legal problems for BH. It's that simple. When it comes to the DMCA, BH has to be very careful. As far as I know, no hosting company has found itself in court because one of its customers put up links to pirated material, but the way the Act is written, it's not at all clear that that couldn't happen. For $7 a month, you don't get to subject BH to the possibility of some very expensive lawsuits.

[BlueHerring]

For "backup" files, it would sure be nice to have something quantifiable rather than just "you probably won't get in trouble if you keep it small".

Is 10 gigabytes monthly FTP traffic small? Storage of a total of a few gigabytes?

Many of us, I think, would really rather have some hard and fast numbers to work with rather than vague policies that can trip us up on a whim.

BlueHerring

Originally Posted by Early Out

You can store as much stuff as you like, as long as the files you're storing have something to do with the websites you have on BH. If you have a bunch of files sitting out there that are not called by any of the pages on your website, that's not allowed. So, it's not the amount of storage you're using that matters, or what specific type of file you're storing. What matters is what those files are used for.

I'm sure BH has no problem with someone keeping some of their backup files on his account, as long as they're not too huge. I have some encrypted zipped financial records sitting up there, which are certainly not part of my website. But we're only talking about 50MB or so (not GB), which no one is going to get upset about.

[redsox9]

Originally Posted by BlueHerring

For "backup" files, it would sure be nice to have something quantifiable rather than just "you probably won't get in trouble if you keep it small".

Is 10 gigabytes monthly FTP traffic small? Storage of a total of a few gigabytes?

Many of us, I think, would really rather have some hard and fast numbers to work with rather than vague policies that can trip us up on a whim.

BlueHerring

Since we aren't employees of BH, the moderators of this forum really cannot answer that question. As Early Out points out, 50 MB of data may not get much attention but at what point would it attract interest? Again, the TOS states that the contents of your account should include only the contents of your account. For example, family photos that are posted on your site would be acceptable; storing thousands of photos in a folder called familyphotos outside the public_html directory (and thus inaccessible from the web) might gather attention.

I would suggest speaking with BH support through LiveChat to clear up any questions or concerns that you have.

[Early Out]

You're asking for hard numbers, but there aren't any. If you stand out from the herd, you're going to attract attention. If you blend in with the herd, you won't be noticed.

It isn't the FTP traffic that matters, by the way - it's the amount of storage space you're using, coupled with the number of individual files. Again, there is no "magic number." About the most precision you're going to get is "way more than everyone else."

Someone at BH once commented that the vast majority of users have less than 1GB of stuff on their accounts. This makes sense when you consider that the storage needs to be in support of your website, and you're not allowed to store copyrighted stuff on there. Image files can start to push the totals up, but you shouldn't be offering up full-size digital images, anyway, since even on a very fast connection, downloading them is likely to be painful for your site visitors.

But if you have a genuine website that includes lots of images (or music and video files that you have created), and gives users the option of downloading the full-size originals, you could start getting into a lot of GB. But that would, IMO, be well within the TOS.

Even then, however, if your site starts getting huge numbers of visitors, and they're all downloading monstrous files, it's going to start affecting everyone else on the system, and BH will bump you for causing performance problems. This is just the way shared hosting works, and has to work, when you think about it.

Without these kinds of controls, BH risks The Tragedy of the Commons.

[Sageth]

Originally Posted by redsox9

For example, family photos that are posted on your site would be acceptable; storing thousands of photos in a folder called familyphotos outside the public_html directory (and thus inaccessible from the web) might gather attention.

Again, this would be somewhat subjective wouldn't it? For example, Gallery2 actually recommends that you put your pictures outside of public_html so that it forces people to stay within the security parameters. The act of having the pictures there wouldn't be against the TOS in this case.

I think this topic is subjective to the employees of BH. Just as I can ban any user from my website with or without warning and can change my terms of service at any time, BH can do the same. The only people that can really answer this question are bluehost.

[Noah]

This topic was very helpful. I'm going to do some cleaning myself! I think I have too many files and a lot of old abandoned stuff on my server, though I really haven't used it for storage purposes.

I also often create zip archives of directories as a backup to recent changes and leave them on my server. I should probably clean these up too.

Not that I am involved or like this kind of material but is gang related photo's forbidden? I wasn't clear on this.