Terms and refunds

Who you are dealing with

SOC Monitor is run by me, Md Jewele Islam, House #15, Malotinagar Dokkhinpara, 5800, Bogra Sadar, Bogra, Bangladesh. Email [email protected]. Prices are in US dollars and are listed on the home page.

What the service is, and is not

• SOC Monitor checks websites (and, if you install the agent, Linux servers) and tells you about problems, with a written fix for each.
• It is not a firewall and does not block attacks. It cannot promise that a site will never go down or be hacked; it promises to tell you about the signs quickly.
• Checks run from one location every few minutes, so a very short outage can be missed, and an alert can be delayed if email or the messaging service is slow.

Accounts and the free trial

• Every new account is approved by hand. Only add websites and servers that you own or are allowed to look after: our checks come from our server's address, and I answer for that traffic.
• The free trial is 30 days for 1 website, with no card. The 30 days start when I approve the account. When it ends, monitoring pauses and your history is kept. Nothing is charged.

Billing

• Billing is by invoice. You ask for a plan, I confirm it, I send an invoice, you pay it. Online card payment is not set up, nothing is charged automatically, and no card details are stored.
• A paid period starts when your payment is recorded.
• If a payment is late, website monitoring keeps running; server monitoring and log collection pause until it is paid. Nothing is deleted.

Cancelling and refunds

• Monthly plans: cancel any time by email. There is no contract. After you cancel you are not charged for the next month. The month you are in is not refunded, and monitoring runs until it ends.
• Yearly plans: cancel any time by email and ask for a refund, and I refund the unused part pro-rata (by the days left on the year).
• Fix work: if we can't fix it, you don't pay.
• Refunds go back the way you paid, and I confirm each one by email.

Fix work and development

• Every fix and every development job is quoted per job, after we look at it. You get a fixed price and what it covers in writing before anything starts. Nothing starts, and nothing is charged, unless you accept.
• If we can't fix it, you don't pay.
• If the job turns out to be bigger than quoted, we stop and ask before doing more. The price you accepted does not go up without your agreement.
• You give us the access the job needs (for example, hosting or WordPress admin), and you can remove it as soon as the work is done.

Care plans (Website Care and Server Care)

A care plan is work done by people, me and my team, on top of SOC Monitor's checks. Website Care is for WordPress websites only and covers one WordPress website. Server Care covers one Linux server that we have full (root) access to, plus Website Care for one WordPress website on it.

Each month we update WordPress, its plugins and its theme (on Server Care, also the server's software) and check your key pages afterwards; keep daily backups away from your hosting, each kept for 30 days, and test-restore one; re-check the security settings we set up; and send you a short report of what we did and found. If an update we made breaks something, we fix it at no charge.

Before a plan starts we check the site or server for free. If it has already been hacked or infected, we clean that first as a separate, quoted job, and the plan starts once it is clean. When the plan starts we set up a security baseline: our own named admin accounts, sensible security settings, and the monitoring.

Free hack cleanup. If a website or server on a paid care plan is hacked after its cleanup benefit has started, we clean it up at no charge. On a monthly plan the benefit starts after 3 consecutive paid months. On a yearly plan, paid upfront, it starts after the first 30 days on the plan. The cleanup means: removing the malicious code, files, users and scheduled tasks we find; restoring from our backup where that is the safer route; closing the way in that we find; changing the passwords we manage; and asking Google and blocklists to review the site once it is clean. It covers one cleanup per website or server in any 12 months, and up to 4 technician hours for that cleanup. If it needs more than 4 hours, we tell you and quote the rest before doing it. A second cleanup within 12 months is quoted.

Before the benefit starts. If a website or server on a care plan is hacked before its cleanup benefit has started, we quote the cleanup at 50% off our standard labour.

The free cleanup does not cover, and these are quoted or are not work we do:

1. a hack before the cleanup benefit has started (quoted at 50% off, as above), or before the plan started;
2. lost sales, revenue or business;
3. the costs of a data breach, such as telling customers or regulators, legal, forensic or insurance costs, and fines;
4. email accounts, mailboxes and email sending;
5. your own or your staff's computers, phones and other devices;
6. a hack through a password or login you shared, reused, or gave to someone else;
7. a breach at your hosting company, domain registrar or another provider you use;
8. a site or server where you turned down an update we recommended in writing, installed a plugin, theme or software, or added an admin user without telling us first, or removed or blocked our access;
9. changes made after the last good backup, which can be lost when we restore it.

What we don't promise. Nobody can honestly promise that a website or server will never be hacked, and we don't. A care plan lowers the chance and makes recovery quicker. The free cleanup is limited as described above; it is not unlimited. SOC Monitor watches and reports; it is not a firewall and it does not block attacks.

Your part. Give us our own named admin accounts (not your login), tell us before adding plugins, users or other developers, keep your hosting and domain paid, and use strong passwords that you don't use anywhere else.

Hours. We work every day, Sunday included, 10:00 to 22:00 Bangladesh time (UTC+6). Every request gets a first reply within 1 day. A site or server that is down or hacked gets a first reply within 4 hours when reported during working hours (or by 14:00 Bangladesh time the next morning if reported overnight), and is handled before anything else. Alerts are sent around the clock; people reply in working hours.

Ending a plan. Cancelling and refunds work as above (monthly: no charge for the next month; yearly: unused part refunded pro-rata). If you ask within 30 days, we send you your latest backup. We remove our accounts, and we delete our copies within 30 days.

Other work. Anything not listed here is quoted per job, as described under "Fix work and development".

Your data

What is collected, how long it is kept and how to have it deleted is on the privacy page.

Responsibility

I do the work carefully. If something goes wrong because of the service, my total responsibility is limited to what you paid me in the 12 months before it happened. Keep your own backups of your website and data (care-plan clients: we also keep them, see Care plans).

Reporting a security problem

If you find a security problem in SOC Monitor itself, email [email protected] (also listed in security.txt). Please don't test against other people's accounts.

Changes

If these terms change, the date at the top changes, and I email customers about it before it applies to them. A price change never applies to a period you have already paid for.