A hosting agreement sets out the rights and responsibilities of a website hosting company and a customer.
This template has been drafted for the situation where the hosting company is hosting a particular website or websites on behalf of the customer (as opposed to providing capacity for the customer to use at its discretion).
It may be adapted to suit the situation where the host is reselling the hosting services of another company - in this case you should ensure that the terms of the hosting agreement are consistent with the upstream terms.
The key provisions in this agreement include:
- Services: what commitments is the hosting company making in relation to the hosting services? What resources will be available to the hosted website(s)? Will the hosting company be providing email, webmail, support, back-up or other ancillary services?
- Acceptable use: what limits are placed upon the customer's use of the services - for example what kinds of website content are impermissible?
- Confidentiality and data privacy - will the hosting company undertake to keep confidential the information of the customers?
A full listing of the sections in the document is as follows: (1) Definitions and interpretation, (2) Term, (3) Transition and implementation, (4) Services, (5) Customer responsibilities, (6) Acceptable use, (7) Charges and payment, (8) Warranties, (9) Limitations and exclusions of liability, (10) Data protection, (11) Confidentiality, (12) Publicity, (13) Termination, (14) Effects of termination, and (15) General.
This hosting agreement is supplied via email link in Word (.doc) format. It is 12 pages long.
The first few sections of this document can be seen free-of-charge here:
precedent hosting agreement
