Terms of Service

Ikon Kode Limited

1. These terms

These terms govern your use of the hosting, domain registration and related services provided by Ikon Kode Limited, company registration number PVT-GYUP7Q7 ("Ikon", "we", "us"). By creating an account, ordering a service, or using the platform, you agree to them.

Payments are handled through Ikon Pay and are governed by our Payment Terms. Your personal data is handled as described in our Privacy Policy. Both form part of this agreement.

Contact for all matters: contact@ikon.ke

2. Your account

You must provide accurate registration details and keep them current. Domain registration requires a complete contact profile, and inaccurate registrant details can cause a domain to be suspended or cancelled by the registry.

You are responsible for everything done through your account. Keep your password and access codes secure and tell us at once if you believe your account has been compromised. We are not liable for loss arising from your failure to keep your credentials secure.

You must be at least 18 years old to hold an account.

3. The services

Shared hosting is provided on our Starter and Business plans. Dedicated-resource hosting is provided on our Pro plans. Dev Sandbox is a free tier on a platform subdomain, provided without any commitment and withdrawable at any time.

Each plan carries limits, including the number of websites you may host, which are stated on the plan at the point of purchase and enforced by the platform. We may set and adjust reasonable limits on storage, bandwidth, processing, memory, email sending and other shared resources. Where your use materially degrades service for other customers, we may throttle, limit or suspend it.

Access to hosting controls, including starting, stopping and restarting your sites, requires an active paid subscription. Details of what happens when payment lapses are in section 6.

4. Availability

We will use reasonable efforts to keep the services available and to restore them promptly after an interruption.

We do not guarantee any level of uptime and we do not offer service credits, refunds or compensation for downtime. The services depend on third parties including our upstream infrastructure providers, domain registries, our domain reseller partners and our payment processor, and may be unavailable because of maintenance, a failure at one of those parties, or events outside our control.

5. Backups

We do not currently provide a backup service. We do not guarantee that any copy of your data exists, and we accept no responsibility for the loss, corruption or deletion of your data.

Maintaining your own backups is entirely your responsibility. Any copies we happen to hold are for our own operational purposes, are not made on your behalf, and may not be available or restorable on request.

We may introduce a backup service in future, on separate terms and at additional cost. Until we do, you should assume no backup exists.

6. Fees, renewal and non-payment

Prices are in Kenyan Shillings and are stated at the point of purchase. Subscriptions renew automatically for the billing cycle you selected until cancelled. Payment terms, including our position on refunds, are set out in the Payment Terms.

If payment is not received when due, your subscription is marked past due. During any grace period your websites remain online but your hosting controls are disabled. If payment is still not received when the grace period ends, the subscription is cancelled, your websites are stopped, and your data may be deleted after that point without further notice.

We may change our prices at any time. A price change takes effect from your next renewal date.

7. Domain names

Domain registration, transfer and renewal are provided through our reseller partners and are subject to the rules of the relevant registry and, for generic top-level domains, to ICANN policy. For .ke domains, KENIC's rules apply. These rules are set by third parties, not by us, and they override anything in these terms that conflicts with them.

You accept that:

• Your registrant contact details, including name, email address, postal address and telephone number, are transmitted to our reseller partner and to the registry, and may be published in public WHOIS or RDAP records where the registry requires it. This is a condition of holding a domain and is not something we can waive.
• Registry rules restrict transfers, including a lock period following registration or a change of registrant.
• Renewal is your responsibility. We send reminders 90, 30, 14 and one day before expiry to the email address on your account, and where auto-renew is enabled we will attempt to bill you in advance. Reminders are a courtesy and their non-delivery does not extend your registration.
• A domain that expires may enter redemption or be released and registered by someone else. Recovery may be impossible or subject to registry fees, which are yours to pay.
• We are not liable for a registry's or reseller's refusal, suspension, cancellation or transfer of a domain.

Domain fees are non-refundable once a registration, renewal or transfer has been submitted to the registry.

8. Acceptable use

You must not use the services to host, transmit, store or link to any of the following:

• Material that is unlawful under Kenyan law, including material that is obscene, that constitutes child sexual abuse material, that incites violence or ethnic hatred, or that is defamatory.
• Material that infringes copyright, trade marks or other intellectual property rights.
• Malware, viruses, ransomware, exploit kits, botnet infrastructure, or phishing pages.
• Unsolicited bulk email, spam, or mailing lists you have no consent to use.
• Content or activity designed to defraud, including fake stores, investment scams and identity theft.
• Cryptocurrency mining, denial-of-service tooling, port scanning, credential stuffing, proxying or anonymisation services, or any activity that overloads our infrastructure or that of a third party.
• Any attempt to gain unauthorised access to our systems, other customers' accounts, or any third-party system. Doing so may constitute an offence under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018 and we will report it.

You are responsible for everything hosted under your account, including content placed there by your own users, clients or applications, and for holding any licence or authorisation your activity requires under Kenyan law.

9. Suspension and termination

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate any account, website, service or domain immediately and without prior notice, at our sole discretion, where we consider it necessary. This includes cases of suspected breach of section 8, illegal content, security compromise, resource abuse, non-payment, a demand from a registry, registrar, law enforcement agency or regulator, or a risk to our platform or other customers.

We are not liable for any loss arising from a suspension or termination made under this section.

Where we suspend or terminate your service, we will tell you at the address on your account as soon as we reasonably can, and will say what caused it unless a law, an investigation or a third-party demand prevents us. You may respond to contact@ikon.ke, and we will reinstate the service if the matter is resolved to our satisfaction. Reinstatement is at our discretion.

You may cancel at any time as set out in the Payment Terms.

On termination for any reason, your right to use the services ends immediately, and we may delete your websites, files, databases and account data. See section 5: you should not rely on us holding a copy.

10. Your content and our access

You keep all rights in the content you host. You grant us only the limited permission to store, copy, transmit and display it as needed to operate the service.

Our staff may access your files, databases and account only where necessary to operate, support, secure or maintain the platform, to investigate a suspected breach of these terms, or where required by law.

We do not monitor customer content generally. Where we are notified of unlawful or infringing material, we will act under section 9. If you believe content hosted by us infringes your rights or breaks the law, write to contact@ikon.ke with the URL, a description of the issue, and your contact details.

11. Third-party dependencies

Parts of the service depend on third parties, including our upstream infrastructure and hosting providers, our domain reseller partners HostAfrica and Hostraha, domain registries, our email delivery provider, and our payment processors. Their acts, omissions, outages, rule changes and charges are outside our control, and we are not liable for them.

12. Our liability

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Subject to that, and so far as the law permits:

• The services are provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or uninterrupted or error-free operation.
• We are not liable for any indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill, anticipated savings, or data, however caused.
• Our total liability to you in any twelve-month period is limited to the total amount you paid us for the affected service in the three months before the event giving rise to the claim.

You will indemnify us against any claim, loss or cost arising from content you host, from your breach of section 8, or from your breach of any law.

13. Changes

We may change these terms at any time, at our sole discretion, without prior notice. Changes take effect when published on our site, and the version published at the time is the version that governs your use. It is your responsibility to review them. Continuing to use the services after a change means you accept it.

We may also modify, suspend or discontinue any part of the services, including any plan or free tier, at any time.

14. Disputes

If a dispute arises, the parties will first attempt to resolve it in good faith through discussion within 30 days of written notice.

If it is not resolved in that time, the dispute shall be referred to and finally resolved by arbitration by a single arbitrator under the Arbitration Act, 1995, administered by the Nairobi Centre for International Arbitration in accordance with its rules. The seat of arbitration is Nairobi and the language is English. The arbitrator's decision is final and binding.

Nothing in this clause prevents either party from seeking urgent interim relief from a court, or from bringing a claim within the jurisdiction of the Small Claims Court where it is competent to hear it.

15. General

Governing law. These terms are governed by the laws of Kenya.

Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our written consent. We may assign ours on notice to you.

Severance. If any provision is found unenforceable, the remainder continues in force.

Entire agreement. These terms, the Payment Terms and the Privacy Policy form the whole agreement between us.

No waiver. If we do not enforce a right, that is not a waiver of it.

Notices. We will contact you at the email address on your account. You should contact us at contact@ikon.ke.

Force majeure. We are not liable for failure to perform caused by events beyond our reasonable control.

Contact. Ikon Kode Limited, contact@ikon.ke