Terms of Service

1. About these terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are an agreement between Media Fortress ("we", "us", "our") and you, the customer ("you", "your"), and apply to all products and services we supply — including web hosting, domain registration, email and Microsoft 365, SSL certificates, website design and build services, website maintenance, and digital marketing services (together, the "Services").

By ordering or using any Service you accept these Terms. We may update these Terms from time to time; the current version will always be published on this page, and material changes will be notified to the email address on your account. Continued use of the Services after a change takes effect constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

You must be at least 18 years of age and provide accurate account information, and keep it current. We may rely on instructions from the primary contact listed on your account.

2. Our services

We agree to supply the Services described in your order at the price agreed at the time of order. Prices are in Australian dollars and, where applicable, inclusive of GST unless stated otherwise. There are no hidden charges: any fee we may charge is either stated in your order, in these Terms, or agreed with you in writing before it is incurred.

3. Accounts & billing

• All Services are billed in advance on the billing cycle you select at checkout (e.g. monthly or annually). Your Service renews automatically at the end of each cycle unless cancelled beforehand.
• Renewal invoices are issued and emailed at least seven (7) days before the due date.
• Invoices unpaid seven (7) days after the due date may incur a late-payment fee of 10% of the invoice value, and the related Service may be suspended until the invoice is paid in full.
• You are responsible for all fees on your account until you cancel in accordance with Section 5. Changing your DNS or moving your website elsewhere does not, on its own, cancel a Service — we cannot infer your intentions from technical changes.
• We may refer significantly overdue accounts to a collection agency, and reasonable recovery costs may be added to the amount owed.

4. Refunds & money-back guarantee

30-day money-back guarantee (hosting)

New web hosting plans are covered by a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you are not satisfied, cancel within 30 days of your initial order and we will refund your hosting fees in full.

The guarantee excludes: domain name registrations (including domains bundled with promotional plans, which will be deducted at standard price from any refund), SSL certificates once issued, Microsoft 365 licences once provisioned, setup or migration labour where specified, and promotional offers stated as excluded at the time of purchase.

After the guarantee period

• Monthly Services: fees already paid are non-refundable; cancellation stops future billing.
• Annual Services: fees are non-refundable after the 30-day guarantee, except as set out in Section 12 or as required by law.
• No refund is payable where a Service is terminated for breach of these Terms (Section 12).

Nothing in this section limits any remedy you may have under the Australian Consumer Law (see Section 13).

5. Cancellation

You may cancel any Service at any time through the client portal at my.mediafortress.com.au. Cancellation via the portal is the only method we can guarantee to action, as it verifies your identity and creates a record; if you are unable to access the portal, contact us and we will assist. Cancellations take effect at the end of the current billing period unless you request immediate termination.

After cancellation, your data may be deleted from our systems and is not guaranteed to be retrievable more than 30 days after the cancellation date. Please take a copy of anything you need before cancelling.

6. Acceptable use

You may use the Services only for lawful purposes. Without limiting that, you must not use the Services to host, store, transmit, link to or distribute:

• material that infringes copyright, trademark or other intellectual-property rights, including pirated software, media or licence keys/cracks;
• malware, phishing content, or tools designed to compromise systems or accounts;
• unsolicited bulk email ("spam") in any form — including advertising a site hosted with us via spam sent through another provider. Mail may only be sent to recipients who have requested it, and you must honour unsubscribe requests immediately;
• material that is defamatory, that promotes violence or hatred, or that provides instruction in illegal activity;
• child sexual abuse material of any kind — accounts involved will be terminated immediately without notice and reported to authorities;
• attempts to probe, breach or circumvent the security of any system, account or network, or to disrupt service to any host or user (including flooding and mail-bombing);
• resource-abusive workloads on shared hosting, including cryptocurrency mining, bulk file-storage/distribution unrelated to a website, and persistent processes that degrade service for other customers.

You are responsible for keeping web applications and scripts on your account (including WordPress core, themes and plugins) reasonably up to date. We may disable, without prior notice, any application that is compromised, actively exploited, or materially affecting server stability, and will notify you when we do.

We are the reasonable arbiter of what constitutes a breach of this section, and we will always attempt to resolve issues with you before taking action except where immediate action is necessary to protect our network, other customers, or to comply with law.

7. Hosting: resources, uptime & support

Resources

Hosting plans include the storage and data-transfer allowances described on our website. If your account exceeds its allowance we will contact you with the option to upgrade or reduce usage; repeated or extreme overages may be billed or, in persistent cases, the account suspended. Traffic within your plan allowance is not otherwise monitored or restricted.

Uptime guarantee

We target 99.99% availability for hosted websites. If availability in a calendar month falls below the thresholds listed, customers in good financial standing may claim a credit against the following month's hosting fee by lodging a support ticket. Downtime is measured from ten minutes after notification via the support system.

• 95%–99.9% availability: 10% credit
• 90%–94.9% availability: 20% credit
• Below 90% availability: 50% credit (maximum credit is 50% of the affected month's fee)

Credits do not apply to downtime caused by scheduled maintenance (notified in advance), your own applications, equipment or actions, breaches of these Terms, DNS propagation, third-party failures, or events beyond our reasonable control.

Support

Our technical support covers our hosting platform, control panel, email delivery from our systems and other matters within our direct responsibility. We will always do our best to help with third-party scripts, themes and applications, but we cannot guarantee fixes for software we did not build or that has been modified by you or a third party. Work beyond support scope can be quoted as a separate service.

8. Backups & data

We operate routine backups of shared hosting servers for disaster-recovery purposes. However, you agree to maintain your own current copy of all content you host with us. Backups are not guaranteed to be available for any specific point in time, and restoration from our disaster-recovery backups where you have not kept your own copy may incur a restore fee of $50 per website.

Customers on a Website Maintenance plan receive the dedicated backup arrangements described in that plan, which take precedence over this section for the covered site.

9. Domain names

• Domain registrations, renewals and transfers are processed once payment is received in full, and are then submitted to the relevant registry. Registry decisions (including eligibility for .au namespaces) are outside our control.
• Domain registration and renewal fees are non-refundable once the domain has been registered or renewed, including domains included in promotional bundles. Please check spelling and availability carefully before ordering.
• You are responsible for maintaining eligibility for your domain (for example, an ABN/ACN connection for .com.au) and for keeping registrant contact details accurate.
• We will send renewal reminders before expiry. If a domain expires, registry-imposed grace, redemption and auction processes apply and recovery may be impossible or costly; we are not liable for loss of an expired domain where reminders were sent to the contact details on your account.
• Transfers away from us are supported in accordance with registry rules; we do not block lawful outbound transfers of paid-up domains. Transfers may fail for registry-side reasons (e.g. registrar lock, 60-day windows, no response from the registrant) which are outside our control.
• If payment for a domain is reversed by chargeback, the registration reverts to us as the paying entity and may be reinstated at our discretion upon payment of the outstanding fees.

10. Design & marketing services

Project work (websites, builds, fixed-scope jobs)

• Project work is quoted in writing with a fixed price and defined scope. Work outside the agreed scope will be quoted separately before it is undertaken.
• Unless otherwise agreed, projects are invoiced as a deposit on commencement with the balance due at completion, prior to launch. Deposits cover work performed and are non-refundable once work has commenced.
• You are responsible for supplying content (text, images, credentials, approvals) within a reasonable time. Projects delayed more than 60 days awaiting client content may be invoiced for work completed to date.
• You warrant that content you supply does not infringe any third party's rights and that you are entitled to use it.

Ongoing marketing services (SEO, Google Ads, social)

• Marketing services are billed monthly with no lock-in contract unless a fixed term is expressly agreed.
• Advertising spend (e.g. payments to Google) is separate from and additional to our management fees, and is payable by you directly to the platform unless otherwise agreed.
• We do not and cannot guarantee specific rankings, traffic levels, lead volumes or revenue outcomes. Search engines and advertising platforms are third parties whose algorithms and policies change without notice. We commit to the work, reporting and standard of care described in your service agreement.
• Advertising and analytics accounts created for you are created under your ownership and remain yours if our engagement ends.

11. Intellectual property

On payment in full for a website project, ownership of the delivered website design and content created specifically for you transfers to you. We retain ownership of our pre-existing tools, frameworks, know-how and any third-party components, which are licensed for use in your website. Third-party assets (themes, plugins, stock imagery, fonts) remain subject to their own licences.

Each party retains ownership of its own trademarks and business names, and neither party may use the other's marks without written consent, except that we may identify you as a client and display work performed for you in our portfolio unless you ask us not to.

You grant us the technical licences necessary to provide the Services, including caching and copying your website content for hosting, backup and delivery purposes.

12. Suspension & termination

We may suspend a Service without liability where: (a) we reasonably believe it is being used in breach of Section 6; (b) invoices are overdue (Section 3); (c) suspension is reasonably necessary to protect our network or other customers; or (d) we are required to by law or a regulator. A reasonable reinstatement fee may apply following suspension for breach or non-payment.

We may terminate a Service: on five (5) days' notice for unpaid amounts; where a material breach of these Terms is not remedied within thirty (30) days of written notice; on one (1) day's notice for repeated breaches of Section 6; or immediately and without notice in extreme cases such as illegal content, active attacks originating from your Service, or child sexual abuse material. No refund is payable for termination due to your breach.

You may terminate immediately if we materially fail to provide a Service in accordance with these Terms and do not remedy the failure within ten (10) days of your written notice describing it. If we choose to discontinue a Service for reasons other than your breach, we will refund the unused portion of fees paid in advance on a pro-rata basis.

Either party may terminate on five (5) days' notice if the other becomes insolvent or subject to bankruptcy or external administration.

13. Liability & Australian Consumer Law

Subject to the paragraph above: the Services are provided on an "as is" basis and we do not warrant that they will be uninterrupted, error-free or completely secure; and all conditions and warranties implied by law are excluded to the maximum extent permitted.

Where our liability for breach of a non-excludable guarantee can lawfully be limited, it is limited (at our option) to resupplying the relevant Services or paying the cost of resupply. Subject to that, neither party is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profits, revenue, data or goodwill; and our maximum aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with the Services, under any theory of law, is limited to the fees paid by you for the affected Service in the three (3) months preceding the event giving rise to the claim.

14. Indemnity

You indemnify us, our officers and employees against third-party claims, losses and reasonable costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of: (a) your use of the Services in breach of law or these Terms; (b) content or products you supply, sell or distribute via the Services, including alleged infringement of third-party rights; and (c) use of your account by any person using your credentials. If you operate an online store, you are solely responsible for your products, orders, taxes, and the security and confidentiality of any customer payment data you handle.

15. General

• Governing law: These Terms are governed by the laws of Victoria, Australia, and the parties submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Victoria.
• Force majeure: Neither party is in default for failure to perform caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including power-grid or internet backbone failure, natural disaster, war, epidemic, industrial action or terrorist activity.
• Law enforcement: We may report suspected unlawful conduct and disclose account information in response to lawful requests from law-enforcement or regulatory agencies, or as required by court process.
• Network changes: We may upgrade or change our network, software and suppliers in our reasonable discretion; where a change is likely to materially affect your Service we will give reasonable notice.
• Notices: Notices to us should be emailed to info@mediafortress.com.au; notices to you will be emailed to your account's primary contact, and are taken to be received on the business day transmitted.
• Assignment: You may not transfer this agreement without our written consent (not unreasonably withheld); we may assign it as part of a business sale or restructure.
• Relationship: The parties are independent contractors; nothing creates a partnership, joint venture or agency.
• Entire agreement: These Terms, together with your order and any written service agreement, form the entire agreement and replace all previous terms and communications on the subject. If any provision is unenforceable, the remainder continues in effect. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• Privacy: Our handling of personal information is described in our Privacy Policy.

Media Fortress · 19/20 Enterprise Drive, Bundoora VIC 3083 · info@mediafortress.com.au