The following document clarifies Datasync's operating and pricing policy regarding services and products that affect standard accounts and outlines pricing standards for services and products which may not be included with standard accounts. All of the information in this document is also included in our Service/Price Schedule or Standard Terms Of Service. Committed to providing the highest quality Internet service to all of our members, Datasync strives to provide ample resources to make this possible. This policy attempts to ensure that excess consumption of a finite resource by any one individual does not impact the quality of service to the remainder of Datasync's customers.

Dialup Lines

Simultaneous use of two or more dialup lines by a single account and/or secondary accounts thereof is allowed, but the primary account will be charged $2.00 per hour per modem of simultaneous dialup access. We do offer secondary accounts with concurrent dialup and full time quota, billed and accounted with the primary, at 10% off the regular account rate.

We do disconnect idle non-dedicated dialup lines after 30 minutes of complete inactivity. Because all non-dedicated accounts are metered time, this is done as a courtesy to those who forget to log out. We have no objection to use of artificial means to defeat the idle timer such as mail checking or "ponger" apps.

Shell Disk Space

Individual accounts may use up to 20 MB of space on the shell host for permanent storage of personal web pages and other files. Commercial web and ftp accounts are allowed an additional 20 MB. Temporary use of more space, within reason, is allowed for the purpose of large file transfer. Continuous consumption of excess space is subject to a $1/MB/month storage charge or a hard quota being set in extreme cases.

Shell Processes

Only ONE background process is permitted per account. Accounts found running more than one will be suspended. Public servers of any kind, including but not limited to irc daemons, MUDs, and webservers, are strictly prohibited. IRC bots must not violate the policies of the servers to which they are connected.

Don't connect your bot to servers where they aren't welcome. Most EFNet servers do not allow them. Each IRC server's message-of-the-day usually outlines their position about bots.

Don't run abusive bots from anywhere on Datasync's network, period. This includes link lookers, nick colliders.

Mail Server

Mass unsolicited mailings, commonly known as "spam", are strictly prohibited. This problem on the Internet at large has become acute as of late, with bulk e-mail software widely available.

Outgoing and incoming mail messages may be no larger than 20 megabytes in size. Mailboxes are limited to 40 megabytes total size at this time. We recommend use of methods other than e-mail for transferring huge files. Large binary files are made even larger by the encoding required for mail transport.

If you have automatic new mail checking enabled in your e-mail software, please check for new mail no more frequently than every five minutes. This goes a long way to make the mail server more responsive for everyone. 

News Server

Usenet spamming, or posting the same off-topic article to many different newsgroups, is also a violation of our Terms of Service. Consensus Usenet spam thresholds shall be used to determine what is and is not spam.

 First time offenders may be given a warning if circumstances warrant. Repeat spammers will have their accounts suspended.

Web Server

Personal accounts are allowed up to 3 Gigabytes/month of file transfers from their web sites and commercial accounts are allowed 10 Gigabytes/month. Extremely high bandwidth web sites which exceed these parameters will be charged an additional amount. Personal web sites in excess of 3 Gigabytes per month will be charged an additional $5/GB/month while commercial web sites will be charged an additional $4/GB/month.

We offer comprehensive reports on web site traffic to our Commercial Web clients. This service is not available for personal sites at this time. We will provide ample advance notice to any sites which exceed the posted limits. Very few of our current sites are even close to these limits. 

FTP Server

Excess anonymous FTP bandwidth is surcharged at the same rate as commercial web sites: $4/GB/month in excess of the first 10 GB.