General Terms
We try to keep things fair, simple and transparent.
General Rules for all services:
- We will notify you within 30 days of any price increases or service changes by way of email to the registered address we have on file for you
- We do not tolerate any abuse of our network in any way. This includes using our systems or services for spam or any other form of illegal activity. We reserve the right to terminate your accounts immediately should we find this. We actively work with anti-spam agencies and the authorities relating to illegal internet use like child pornography, child abuse, animal cruelty etc.
- We do not monitor individual emails, web usage or content and believe in your rights to freedom of internet use. However, we do monitor usage patterns of users and groups of users in order to manage our own usage policies. We also adhere to legal guidelines to provide information to authorities only if they have the necessary legal right and/or court order to request this.
- We will not share your personal information, including email address, with anyone else.
- We will refund monies to you at the appropriate pro-rata rate based on the terms of the service you have with us.
- We reserve the right to charge interest at 1% per month on outstanding amounts. Payment for our services are generally in advance.
- We will not terminate your services unless we have failed to gain a response from you within a reasonable time frame. Services will be permitted to continue in the interest of maintaining your services and not to inconvenience you where possible.
- If you have any queries, concerns or issues please contact us as we are always happy to help in any way we can.
1. Irresponsible Usage
- You may use our Services for lawful purposes only. You may not use them:
- in any way that breaches any applicable local, national or international law or regulation;
- in any way that is unlawful or fraudulent, or has any unlawful or fraudulent purpose or effect;
- in any way for the purpose of harming or attempting to harm minors;
- to knowingly transmit any data, send or upload any material that contains viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time-bombs, keystroke loggers, spyware, adware or any other harmful programs or similar computer code designed to adversely affect the operation of any computer software or hardware;
- to infringe the rights of others, including the right of privacy and copyright (an example would be sharing without permission of the copyright owner protected material such as a music or video file);
- to Illegally or irresponsibly, to the detriment of other users extract, collect, process, combine or store personal data about other users;
- to forge headers or otherwise manipulate identifiers in order to disguise the origin of any Content transmitted through our Services;
- You acknowledge that all information, data, text, software, music, sound, photographs, graphics, video, messages and other materials (“Content”), whether publicly posted or privately transmitted, are the sole responsibility of the person from which such Content originated. This means that you are entirely responsible for all Content that you upload, post, email or otherwise transmit via our Services;
- You agree that you are responsible for the conduct of all users of your account and any Content that is created, transmitted, stored, or displayed by, from, or within your account while using Plugin.co.uk Limited services and for any consequences thereof;
- Customers posting any of the above prohibited content on their sites (or through servers or services we have provided) will be notified using Customer’s current email address on file, and may be suspended or given a time frame to take corrective actions. If no corrective actions are taken, PlugIn.co.uk Limited will suspend the services of the account in question until a resolution is met between PlugIn.co.uk Limited and the Customer.
2. Use of your account
- You must not use your PlugIn.co.uk Limited account for the purpose of obtaining unauthorised access to any computer or service. You are responsible at all times for use of the account, whether through yourself or through third parties. Customers must not, via tunnelling, use of proxies, or by any other means, attempt to avoid the service restrictions imposed on their account type.
- In order to access certain Services, you may be required to provide information about yourself (such as identification or contact details) as part of the registration process for the Service, or as part of your continued use of the Services.
- You agree that any registration information you give to us will always be accurate, correct and up to date.
- If you provide any information that is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, or we have reasonable grounds to suspect that such information is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, we have the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Services (or any portion thereof).
3. Abuse of resources and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks:
- You must not use our services in a manner that, in our reasonable discretion, directly or indirectly produces or threatens to produce a negative effect on our network other than in a manner for which the services we provide you are designed or that interferes with the use our network or services by other customers including, without limitation, overloading or causing portions of the our infrastructures to be blocked by other Internet Service Providers.
4. Unsolicited Communications
- You must not use our services to send unsolicited bulk messages, use a non-existent email return address, openly relay email or send out unsolicited email from any other network that points to a PlugIn.co.uk Limited server and other unsolicited communications not mentioned herein.
5. Access to Other Computers or Networks without Authorisation
- You must not use our services to attempt unauthorised and/or illegal access of computers, networks and/or accounts not belonging to the party seeking access or any other act relating to any unauthorised circumvention of security measures.
6. Suspension and Termination
- Failure to comply with this policy constitutes a material breach of Services Agreement and may result in our taking all or any of the following actions:
- immediate, temporary or permanent withdrawal of your right to use our Service;
- immediate, temporary or permanent removal of any posting or material uploaded by you to our site;
- Issuing of a warning to you;
- Commencement of legal proceedings against you for reimbursement of all costs on an indemnity basis (including, but not limited to, reasonable administrative and legal costs) resulting from the breach;
- further legal action against you;
- disclosure of such information to law enforcement authorities as we reasonably feel is necessary. Any breaches of this policy should be reported to abuse@plugin.co.uk and any entire posting, together with the full headers, should be forwarded. Although it is not always possible to respond to each abuse report, all complaints will be investigated thoroughly.
- We exclude liability for actions taken in response to breaches of this policy. The responses described in this policy are not limited, and we may take any other action we reasonably deem appropriate.
7. Changes to this Policy
- We may revise this policy at any time by amending this page. You are expected to check this page from time to time to take notice of any changes we make, as they are legally binding on you. Some of the provisions contained in this policy may also be superseded by provisions or notices published elsewhere on our site.
There’s nothing hidden or any rules that a reasonable person wouldn’t expect. Please also see specific guidelines for .UK domain names below.
1. Payment for domain registration and renewal is annually (or more) in advance and must be paid prior to renewal. Nominet-based domains (.uk) are registered for periods of 2 years and therefore bi-annually in advance.
2. You will receive a renewal reminders 60, 30 days and 14 days prior to renewal. If you do not respond to these we will not automatically renew your domain for you.
3. Once registered the domain belongs to you and is registered in your name. Whilst we will be the admin and technical contact for you for the domain, you are free to move it anywhere you like and we will not charge you to move your domain away from us.
4. You can choose to protect the information our registrar’s publish on their whois information by upgrading where available to privacy options on your domains.
5. We do not permit registering of domains for illegal purposes.
6. Domain names cannot be changed or refunded once registered for you
7. You can transfer any domain away from us as a registrar free of charge. We will not transfer domains if your account has any sums outstanding.
Expiring .UK Domain Names
If you request that you no longer wish to have your domain name renewed by us and do not request it to be transferred away to another registrar, it will be left to expire and all services we provide regarding that domain name will be suspended. Your domain name will then go into a 30 day protected period, after 30 days your domain will be suspended by Nominet and it will go into a 60 day grace period. If you change your mind and still wanted to retain your domain name, you still can and at the original renewal price. This must be requested by email before the 80th day after your domain has expired. Approximately 93 days after expiry your domain will be cancelled and deleted from the register, and made available for resale through a third party registrar by Nominet. PlugIn.co.uk Limited will not guarantee the renewal of a domain name after this happens.
Nominet-specific terms (for .co.uk and other .uk domains)
In addition to our terms and conditions, as registrars for your domain name you must also agree to the Nominet terms and conditions, available here. Nominet are a not-for-profit organisation in charge of dealing with all .uk domain names for the UK. PlugIn.co.uk Limited are members of Nominet and adhere to their codes of practice.
Contact Details for Nominet:
Nominet,
Minerva House
Edmund Halley Road,
Oxford Science Park, Oxford. OX4 4DQ
Telephone: 01865 332348
Email: drs@nominet.org.uk
www.nominet.org.uk
There’s nothing hidden or any rules that a reasonable person wouldn’t expect. We try to be fair in terms of credit control, usage tolerance and migrations away and will always act in a manner fair to both you and us as a company.
1. Payment for all email services, unless agreed otherwise, is in advance. Normally paid at least 7 days prior to the renewal date to allow for any problems.
2. Contract terms are monthly rolling. We require 30 days notice of termination prior to your renewal date to avoid being charged for the following period. This can be from the primary email account but if we have not acknowledged your email do not assume we have received it. If you are in the first 30 days of your contract with us you can terminate your contract at any time within those first 30 days for a full refund.
3. If you opted to pay by credit card you are agreeing to continuous authority to charge the card we hold on file (securely) until the service or contract is terminated
4. We do not permit spamming in any way shape or form. If you are sending bulk emails they should be in compliant with UK law. We aim to operate a responsible mail system and so can apply limits on the number of emails you can send each day and a recipient CC/BCC maximum if we believe you are abusing our systems.
5. As part of our anti-spam monitoring, we reserve the right to suspend an account should any spam-like activity be detected.
6. Renewal of your email package will be automatic. You will receive an invoice prior to it’s renewal which must be paid before the renewal date.
7. We do not charge for card declines, standing order declines or cheque bounces at present. However, should this happen on more than 3 occasions per year we reserve the right to then charge £20 per incident. Incorrect chargebacks on your card will be charged at £20 per incident (our costs)
8. We do not accept liability for loss or loss arising from failure to receive or send emails.
9. We reserve to right to ask any email account, giving them 30 days notice, to move their email to another provider for any reason we see fit (whilst this will only be in extreme cases). We will refund any full months paid. We will terminate accounts without notice for users sending spam or using their email or hosting facilities for illegal activities without refund.
Reliability of Email
In reality email is never a perfect science or system. Email can get lost (very rare) or can get wrongly identified as spam (less rare). Whilst we do everything we can to prevent any errors, it is possible. We log all email traffic and can trace everything within our network based on the Email headers (we do not store the body of emails, log it’s contents, log filtering of content – outside of the emails being stored within your own account folders on our server).
Email Privacy
We don’t have direct access to the content of your emails or password, therefore no-one else can access them without your username and password. We also don’t have the ability to easily access the contents of your messages.
We are often asked if emails can be intercepted on the internet or indeed if we can read peoples emails. Just like normal mail, the answer to both is yes. However, our staff cannot easily read the content of your emails on their systems but can see the headers (to, from, subject, dates and size information). It’s incredibly difficult for us to then read the body of your emails but it is possible. If you don’t want email to be intercepted on the internet itself then you should use encryption software. SSL encryption, which our system uses, only works if the recipients email system uses SSL or TLS too. If this is the case, the email body is encrypted from end to end and cannot be read until it reaches the recipient. If you want advice about how to make your email more secure, please contact us.
There’s nothing hidden or any rules that a reasonable person wouldn’t expect. We try to be fair in terms of credit control, usage tolerance and migrations away and will always act in a manner fair to both you and us as a company.
1. Payment for all hosting services, unless agreed otherwise, is in advance. Normally paid at least 7 days prior to the renewal date to allow for any problems.
2. Contract terms are monthly rolling. We require 30 days notice of termination prior to your renewal date to avoid being charged for the following period. This can be from the primary email account but if we have not acknowledged your email do not assume we have received it. If you are in the first 30 days of your contract with us you can terminate your contract at any time within those first 30 days for a full refund.
3. If you opted to pay by credit card you are agreeing to continuous authority to charge the card we hold on file (securely) until the service or contract is terminated
4. We guarantee 99% uptime and will pay pro-rate compensation for website downtime of more than 1 hour per day with a minimum of 1 day refund and maximum of 1 full month refund
5. We do not permit the use of a hosting account for public FTP, peer-to-peer or file sharing.
6. Renewal of your hosting package will be automatic. You will receive an invoice prior to it’s renewal which must be paid before the renewal date.
7. We do not charge for card declines, standing order declines or cheque bounces at present. However, should this happen on more than 3 occasions per year we reserve to right to then charge £20 per incident. Incorrect chargebacks of your card payment will be charged at £20 plus VAT (our costs)
8. We reserve to right to ask any hosting account, giving them 30 days notice, to move their site to another provider for any reason we see fit (whilst this will only be in extreme cases). We will refund any full months paid in advance. We will terminate accounts without notice for users sending spam or using their email or hosting facilities for illegal activities with no refund.
Money Back guarantee
If you are not entirely satisfied with your hosting during your first 30 days with us, we will refund you 100% (excluding domain registration and other services).
There’s nothing hidden or any rules that a reasonable person wouldn’t expect. We try to be fair in terms of credit control, usage tolerance and migrations away and will always act in a manner fair to both you and us as a company.
1. Payment for all broadband services, unless agreed otherwise, is in advance. Normally paid at least 7 days prior to the renewal date to allow for any problems.
2. Minimum contract terms are 1 month, except for Unlimited packages which have a 12 month minimum. We require 20 days notice of termination notice prior to your renewal date to avoid being charged for the following month. This can be from the primary email account but if we have not acknowledged your email do not assume we have received it.
3. If you opted to pay by credit card you are agreeing to continuous authority to charge the card we hold on file (securely) until the service or contract is terminated
4. We will not refund for downtime unless notified or agreed otherwise or unless we receive a valid claim under out Uptime Guarantee.
5. If an engineer visit is required and agreed with us after trying all other possible failure points, we will instruct an Openreach engineer to visit. If no fault is found (or missed appointment/abortive visit), we will pass on their charges, currently £100 plus VAT per visit. We will contest any charges on your behalf if we feel the fault does lie with BT. Appointments can be cancelled up to 1.30pm on the day before the visit (or will be charged as an aborted visit)
6. If you move house we need as much notice as possible to ensure continuation of your broadband. At least 21 days if possible. There may be new activation fees for your new property and cease fees for your old property (these are charge at our BT cost prices)
7. Should you wish to migrate to another provider your new provider can initiate this transfer. Due to OFCOM codes of practice we are not supposed to contact you after you have initiated a migration to try to entice you to stay with our service, therefore if you are thinking of migrating away please feel free to contact us prior to initiating a migration to see if we can address any issues you have with our service.
8. Once you have consumed your monthly bandwidth allowance and any remaining Top Up allowances already purchased your connection will be rate limited to 128Kbps for an additional 1GB bandwidth. Upon consumption of the additional 1GB the connection will be blocked until you purchase an additional Top Up or you reach the next billing period start date. Top Up’s can be purchased at any time in blocks on 10Gb and have no expiry date.
9. Failure to clear outstanding balances before your renewal date may result in automatic termination of your broadband account. You should contact us as soon as possible – we’re normally happy to hang on for payment if you explain the problem. If your account is terminated, you may have to pay a reactivation fees to BT via us to reinstate it, this fee may be charged regardless of whether you change ISP or not. We reserve the right to suspend broadband access and email too should we not hear from you. We try to avoid suspension and termination wherever possible.
10. We do not charge for card declines, standing order declines or cheque bounces at present. However, should this happen on more than 3 occasions per year we reserve to right to then charge £20 per incident. Accidental Charge Backs on your credit card cost us £20 plus VAT per chargeback – we will pass this charge onto you.
11. We reserve to right to ask any broadband user, giving them 30 days notice, to migrate themselves to another provider for any reason we see fit (whilst this will only be in extreme cases). We will refund any overpayments in accordance with that service’s terms. We will also terminate accounts without notice and with no refunds for users sending spam or using their connection for illegal activities.
12. CEASE CHARGES: (as at June 2019) Ceased connections for any reason are charged at BT Wholesale at a cost price of £32.00 plus VAT or whatever the current BT charge is at the time and include ceases for move home, line cease, LLU migration failure and if we have to cease your connection for non-payment. Successful migrations to other ISP and LLU providers remain free of charge.
13. ORDER CANCELLATION CHARGES: (as at June 2019). Orders cancelled whilst in progress will be charged at £25.00 plus VAT.
Uptime Guarantee
The spirit of this pledge is to assure you that we take your broadband uptime very seriously and will do everything within our power to maintain 99% uptime for you. We’re so confident in our ability to provide the most reliable internet service in the UK for home and business that we back it up with our Uptime Guarantee. Of course, sometimes your internet might go down for various reasons beyond our control but, rest assured, our commitment is there to ensure we’re on top of any problem and will work our very best to resolve any issues in record time – and if not, we’ll give you your money back.
Terms
We will pay compensation, on the basis of 1/30th of your monthly subscription for any 24hour period or part thereof, under any of the following circumstances:
1. Where we have misdiagnosed a problem which could have been resolved earlier.
2. Where we have failed to respond to a request for assistance or follow up on a problem within 2 hours
3. Where an Openreach outage or known fault has not been fixed within 24hours of the customer first reporting the issue to us.
4. Where the customer is not satisfied that the problem has been resolved within a reasonable time frame.
Exclusions
PlugIn.co.uk Limited will not pay compensation in the following circumstance:
1. A known Openreach exchange outages of no more than 24hours
2. Where the problem is shown to be derived from the customers own equipment or internal telephone wiring (including faulty computer, faulty router, faulty cabling or another faulty device on the network)
3. Where the customer has not followed our remedy instructions within a reasonable time frame – for example, if we ask for the router to be plugged into the test socket and this is not performed within an hour.
4. When the fault is shown to be a BT/Openreach fault (after all other work has been completed) and an onsite engineer has been booked for the next available slot – this is deemed a “known Openreach fault”
5. When there is an extended outage due to a long-line syncing problem. Any line over 4 miles from the exchange, which syncs at less than 1Mbps may be unstable anyway.
PlugIn.co.uk Limited is not liable whatsoever for any other loss incurred as a result of downtime for broadband.
Claims procedure
Please contact us at support@plugin.co.uk detailing your complaint and request for a refund, describing the problem with timescales and as much detail as possible. We will investigate and where applicable, issue a credit note on your account. This claim must be submitted within 7 working days of the resolution of the fault. Our decision will be fair and impartial and final.
Broadband Speeds
In essence we operate a transparent policy on the speeds we offer our customers and try to ensure customers get the best speeds their line can support. We will publish our actual customer average speed monthly on our website. Whilst our services are advertised as “up to xMbits per second” this is purely a maximum figure based on perfect line conditions. The speed you receive is determined by several factors and there are two types of speed measurements.
SYNC rate is the speed your modem negotiates with the exchange for optimum throughput speed based on data obtained by the equipment in your exchange. This is determined primarily by the quality and length of the cable between you and your exchange. Interference and loss of signal along the cable directly affects your SYNC speed and actual throughput speed.
THROUGHPUT speed is the measured speed you get when transferring data from your computer to the internet – it’s the figure speedtesters will give you (you can use BT’s at http://speedtester.bt.com or there are many third party test). This is determined, in addition to your sync speed, by several factors including contention and congestion on the line. You’ll always get a lower speed at busy internet times like 6-11pm when the internet as a whole is at it’s busiest, not only our network. Typically this might be as low at 50% of your sync speed. Your router, wireless connection and computer can also affect this. If you run several speed tests one after the other or throughout the day you’ll get varying different readings – that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. You’ll get maximum speeds during quiet times and lower speeds at busy times. The number of people online and downloading in your area at the same time you take these tests can affect them dramatically. Please feel free to contact us if you don’t think you’re getting a fast enough connection. Our systems are designed to give you the fastest speed your line can handle.
Migration Policy
We adhere to industry and OFCOM guidelines for customers wishing to move their broadband away from us. Asking for a migration does not constitute the termination of your contract with us, it is only a termination once your broadband has been migrated. We still actively pursue unpaid invoices after migration.
We are a strong believer in protecting your data and ensuring your privacy. For full details of our Privacy Policy and our Cookie Policy please view the relevant sections on our website.
About Us
PlugIn.co.uk Limited was established in 1998 as an Internet provider for SME’s and individuals. We provide high quality and reliable internet services, including broadband, email, hosting and web design, as well as support services primarily to UK based SME’s and individuals.
The purpose of the Code
The purpose of this Code of Practice is to provide full information about your relationship with us.
Contact details
Our contact details can be found at https://www.plugin.co.uk/contact-us.html
General philosophy
It’s about reliable internet and good support for our users. We provide services to the standard we’d expect ourselves and beyond. We aim to innovate in our approach to Internet products and customer service and support.
Range of services
Aimed at both business and residential users, our full range of internet products can be found on our website at https://www.plugin.co.uk
Customer Service
We promise to try to:
- Answer support emails, during open support hours, in our call queue within 1 hour
- Resolve and work on faults tirelessly until resolved, and ensure service is restored, for whatever reason, as quickly as possible. Return email support enquiries, during open support hours, within 2 hours
- Prioritise emergency and business-related support issues wherever possible
- Work with our suppliers and third party companies involved, including BT Wholesale and Openreach, to reach the quickest conclusion to faults.
Charges
The following payment methods are accepted: All major credit cards, Debit Card (except Visa Electron), Cheque, BACS transfer, Direct Debit and Standing Order. Cash payments are not accepted. Full itemisation is available on invoices. All products and services are made as a single supply; your account may be suspended or closed if any sum due for a product or service is unpaid or is in arrears.
Faults
Although we attempt to provide all customers with the best possible service, we cannot guarantee that products and services will never be faulty. However, we will correct all reported faults as soon as we reasonably can. If there is a fault with your service, you should report it as soon as possible by contacting our Support team at support@plugin.co.uk. Where applicable, information about the target time to fix faults will be provided for the product in question.
Complaints
PlugIn.co.uk Limited’s complaint handling process can be found below under the Complaints heading.
Terminating contracts
We reserve the right to disconnect or suspend services in accordance with our terms and conditions. Customers have the ability to cancel services by email or in writing (snail mail letter). Minimum term details and notification periods can be found in our terms and conditions
Complaints
We’ll try to resolve things to be fair on both you and us We appreciate that sometimes things can go wrong and are very proud of our customer care. But if you do have an issue or complaint please follow the procedure below and we’ll try to resolve it as quickly and reasonably as possible.
Complaints procedure:
Your first port of call should be the sales person or support engineer you have been dealing with. Explain your problem or issue over the telephone or by email. We aim to respond to all emails with 4 hours. Our policy is always to help as much as possible and it’s not always a particular member of our staff’s fault if something does go wrong.
If this is not working for you please outline the full history of the problem in an email or letter addressed to our customer services team who will investigate fully and respond within 48hours. We aim to resolve escalated cases within 5 days. Email complaints@plugin.co.uk A member of management will collect all the relevant details and investigate the complaint. They will then contact you with the outcome of that investigation.