Terms and conditions.

These terms are an agreement between you and WiseGuy Design. Section 43 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 requires an online supplier to publish the following, so here it is in one place.

Legal name

WiseGuy Design

Place of business

Gqeberha, South Africa

Email

hello@wiseguydesign.co.za

Telephone

+27 71 613 7767

Website

wiseguydesign.co.za

In these terms, we, us and our mean WiseGuy Design. You and your mean the person or business that opens an account, places an order, or uses any of our services. Services means everything we sell: website hosting, email hosting, domain name registration, transfers and renewals, and design and development work.

You agree to these terms when you do any of the following: create an account, place an order, pay an invoice, or use a service we provide. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it.

Section 13 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act gives an electronic agreement the same force as a signed one. Clicking through a checkout, replying to accept a quote, or paying an invoice is a signature for the purposes of this agreement.

Where a signed proposal, quote or service agreement covers the same ground as these terms, that document wins on the points it actually deals with, and these terms fill in everything it does not.

The Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 applies to this agreement where you are a natural person, or a business whose annual turnover and asset value fall below the threshold set by the Minister. Nothing in these terms limits a right the Act gives you, and where a clause here and the Act disagree, the Act wins.

You need an account to buy hosting or a domain from us. You must give accurate details and keep them current — particularly your email address, because it is where renewal notices, invoices and expiry warnings are sent. A domain that lapses because a notice went to an old address is not something we can undo.

You are responsible for what happens under your account, including anything done by someone you gave access to. Keep your password to yourself, and tell us straight away at hello@wiseguydesign.co.za if you think someone else has it.

We may refuse to open an account, or close one, where the details given are false, where an account is used to abuse the service, or where we are required to by law.

An order placed on this site is an offer to buy, not a concluded sale. The agreement comes into existence when we accept it — which is when we provision the service or register the domain, not when the checkout page thanks you.

We may decline an order. The usual reasons are that a domain turned out to be unavailable between the search and the payment, that the registry rejected the application, that a price was displayed in error, or that we cannot verify who you are.

Section 43(6) of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act entitles you to a full refund within 30 days where we fail to perform. If we decline an order you have already paid for, we refund it in full — we do not hold a credit against a future order unless you ask us to.

Where a price is obviously wrong — an inadvertently missing digit, a decimal in the wrong place — we may cancel the order and refund you rather than honour it. Section 23(9) of the Consumer Protection Act allows this for a genuine, unintentional error, and it is the only circumstance in which we will do it.

All prices on this site are in South African Rand and are the full amount payable.

We are not registered for VAT. No VAT is charged on anything we sell, and no VAT is claimable on what we invoice. Our invoices are headed "Invoice", never "Tax Invoice", and the subtotal and total are the same figure.

Card and instant-EFT payments are processed by PayFast, a South African payment gateway. Your card details are entered on PayFast's systems and are never seen, handled or stored by us or by this website. We receive a confirmation that a payment succeeded and the amount of it, and nothing else.

An invoice is issued once payment is confirmed and is available in your account under Orders. Invoices are final once issued: the billing details on an invoice are a snapshot taken at the moment it was raised, so changing your address later does not rewrite an invoice you have already been sent.

Where we quote for design or development work, the quote is valid for 30 days and the payment schedule in it — typically a deposit before work starts and the balance on delivery — forms part of this agreement.

Prices for hosting may change. We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before an increase takes effect, and it will only ever apply from your next renewal, never mid-term. Domain prices are different: they follow the registry's own fees, which can move at short notice and sometimes do so between your renewal notice and your renewal date. We pass those through at cost plus our published margin and will tell you the figure before charging it.

Hosting is sold as a recurring monthly or annual service and renews automatically until you cancel it. Domains renew for the term you choose. We send a renewal notice by email before each renewal.

If a payment fails, we will retry it and tell you. If an account stays unpaid:

1. After 7 days we may suspend the service. Your website and email stop working, but your data is untouched and the service is restored as soon as the account is settled.
2. After 30 days we may terminate the service and delete the data on it. Deletion is permanent — we do not keep an archive of a terminated account.

A suspended domain is a separate matter, and the timing is set by the registry rather than by us. See Domain names below.

We may charge interest on overdue amounts at the maximum rate permitted by the National Credit Act 34 of 2005, and recover the reasonable cost of collecting them.

Hosting

You may cancel hosting at any time by writing to hello@wiseguydesign.co.za or from your account. Section 14 of the Consumer Protection Act lets you cancel a fixed-term agreement on 20 business days' notice, and we apply the same 20 business days to month-to-month hosting. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the notice period; the service continues, and is payable, until then.

We will not make you telephone anyone, sit through a retention offer, or explain yourself. An email saying you want to cancel is a cancellation.

Domains

Cancelling means turning off auto-renewal, which you can do at any time up to the renewal date. A domain already registered stays yours until it expires, whether or not you keep an account with us, and you are free to move it to another registrar at any point.

Design and development work

You may cancel a project at any time by writing to us. You are liable for work already done and for costs already committed on your behalf up to the date we receive your notice, and no more. We will send you everything produced to that point once that invoice is settled.

What happens to money already paid is set out in Refunds below.

We would rather refund someone than argue with them. What follows is meant to be read once and understood — the rule for each thing we sell, why it is that way, and what to do about it.

Two principles sit underneath all of it. You should not pay for a service you did not receive. And we should not carry a cost we have already paid to someone else on your behalf and cannot get back. Almost every rule below is one of those two.

Hosting — 30-day money back, no reasons asked

If you are not happy with our hosting, tell us within 30 days of first ordering it and we will refund what you paid, in full. You do not need a reason and we will not ask for one. This is deliberately more generous than the seven days the law requires, because a week is not long enough to know whether a host suits you.

The guarantee covers the hosting fee. It does not cover a domain bought alongside it — that is separately explained below — and it applies once per customer, not once per plan on a rolling basis.

Hosting — after the first 30 days

Monthly plans. Cancel and you are billed to the end of the notice period, then no further. We do not refund part of a month already used, and we do not bill you for one you have not reached.

Annual plans. We refund the unused whole months, pro rata. Section 14(3)(b)(ii) of the Consumer Protection Act allows a supplier to deduct a reasonable cancellation penalty, and ours is capped at 10% of the refundable amount so you always know the worst case in advance. We waive it entirely where you are cancelling because we failed — an outage we caused, a service that did not do what we said it would, a price increase you did not accept.

If we get it wrong. Where a fault on our side made a service unusable for a meaningful stretch, tell us and we will credit or refund that period. We do not require you to have logged a ticket at the time.

Domains — the honest answer

A registered domain cannot be refunded. Not by us, and not by any other registrar. This is the one place we cannot be flexible, so here is exactly why.

The moment you order a domain, we pay the registry its fee and the name is allocated to you. That payment is final and non-reversible from our side — there is no mechanism by which a registry returns it. Refunding you would mean absorbing a cost that has already left the business for a name that is now yours and that we cannot resell. Section 42(2) of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act recognises exactly this by removing the seven-day cooling-off right where performance begins, with your consent, immediately.

So, concretely:

• A domain that was registered — no refund, including a typo in the name. Check the spelling on the confirmation screen; it is the last moment at which a mistake costs nothing.
• A renewal that went through — no refund. Turn off auto-renewal before the renewal date if you do not want it.
• A registration that failed — full refund, always, and automatically. If the registry rejected it or the name was taken between your search and your payment, you get every cent back without asking.
• A transfer that did not complete — full refund of the transfer fee.
• A redemption fee — no refund once paid, for the same reason: it goes straight to the registry.

Where a domain is refundable we will always tell you so before you pay, on the checkout page. Where it is not, we will not let the point pass in silence.

Design and development work

Deposits reserve time in our schedule and are not refundable once a project has started, because the cost of holding that time is real and immediate. If we have not started, and you change your mind, we refund the deposit in full.

Cancel mid-project and we reconcile honestly: you are charged for work completed and costs committed, and anything you have paid over that is refunded. If our reckoning of what has been done and yours differ, send us yours — we would rather settle it in an email than defend a number.

If we deliver work that does not do what was agreed, we fix it. That is the first remedy and usually the right one. Where it genuinely cannot be fixed, section 54 of the Consumer Protection Act entitles you to a refund of a reasonable portion of the price, and we will pay it.

Duplicate and incorrect charges

Charged twice, charged the wrong amount, or charged after you cancelled? Tell us and we refund it in full, immediately, without treating it as a claim to be assessed. It was our error and it is ours to correct.

When we will not refund

So the exceptions are in one place rather than scattered: we do not refund a registered or renewed domain, a redemption fee, a third-party licence or certificate already bought on your instruction, an account terminated for a serious breach of Acceptable use, or a chargeback raised without contacting us first. On the last of those — please just ask us. A chargeback costs us a fee on top of the amount and gets you your money more slowly than an email would.

How to ask for a refund, and how long it takes

1. Email hello@wiseguydesign.co.za from the address on your account, with the invoice or order number and what you would like refunded.
2. We acknowledge within 2 business days, and tell you in the same message whether it is approved. If we need something from you, we ask for all of it at once rather than in instalments.
3. Approved refunds are paid within 10 business days, and usually a good deal sooner.

Refunds go back to the method the payment came from — card refunds to the same card, EFT payments to the account they came from. We cannot refund to a different card, account or person than the one that paid, and this is a fraud control rather than an inconvenience. Bank clearing times are outside our hands: a card refund typically reflects in 3 to 10 business days after we release it.

Where an order fails on our side — a service we could not provision, a payment taken for something we did not deliver — section 43(6) of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act gives you a full refund within 30 days, and we do not wait to be asked.

If you think this policy has been applied unfairly

Say so, to the same address, and ask for it to be looked at again. If we still disagree, Complaints and disputes below sets out where else you can take it — including, where the Consumer Protection Act applies to you, the National Consumer Commission. Nothing in this policy takes away a right that Act gives you.

We are a reseller. When you register a domain through us, we submit the application to a registrar, who submits it to the registry that runs the extension — ZACR for .co.za and the other .za extensions under the oversight of ZADNA, and the relevant registry operator under ICANN contract for .com, .net and the rest.

That chain matters, because it decides who can do what:

• The registry's rules bind you directly. By registering a domain you agree to the registration policies of the registry concerned, and to ICANN's policies where they apply. Those rules are not ours, we cannot vary them, and they can change without our agreement.
• Availability is only confirmed at the registry. A domain shown as available in a search can be taken between the search and the payment. We have no way to reserve one in the interval.
• Registration is not guaranteed. A registry may reject an application — for a restricted extension, a failed eligibility check, or a name held back. Where that happens we refund you in full.

You are the registrant

The domain is registered in your name, not ours. You are the registrant and you own it. We do not hold domains hostage against unpaid accounts and we will not transfer one away from you without your instruction.

You warrant that you are entitled to use the name — that registering and using it does not infringe anyone's trade mark or other rights, and that you are not registering it in bad faith. Choosing the name is your decision. We do not search trade mark registers for you and we do not advise on whether a name is safe to use.

Registrant details and public records

Registries require accurate registrant contact details and publish some of them in a public lookup (WHOIS or RDDS). What is published differs by extension. Supplying false details is a ground on which a registry may suspend or cancel a domain. There is more on what is published, and why we cannot withhold it, in our Privacy Policy.

Expiry, grace and redemption

A domain that is not renewed by its expiry date stops resolving — the website and any email on it go down. After that, most extensions allow a grace period in which it can still be renewed at the normal price, then a redemption period in which it can be recovered only on payment of a registry redemption fee, which is substantial and set by the registry. After redemption closes, the name is released and anyone may register it.

The grace and redemption periods that apply to each extension we sell are published on our domain pricing page. They are the registry's periods, not ours, and we cannot extend them by a single day.

Renewal is ultimately your responsibility. We send reminders as a courtesy and in good faith, but a reminder that is not delivered — a full mailbox, a spam filter, an address you no longer read — does not extend a deadline.

Transfers

You may transfer a domain to us or away from us at any time, subject to the registry's rules. Those commonly include a 60-day lock after registration or after a change of registrant, a valid authorisation code, and a requirement that the domain is not in dispute. Transferring in usually adds a year to the registration term; transferring out does not forfeit time already paid for.

Disputes over a name

Disputes about who is entitled to a domain are decided by the dispute process for that extension, not by us. For .za domains that is the Alternate Dispute Resolution process under the regulations to the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, administered by an accredited provider. For most other extensions it is ICANN's Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. We will comply with any order or determination made under those processes, and with any order of a court of competent jurisdiction.

Each hosting plan is sold with published limits — storage, mailboxes, sites and bandwidth. The limits for the plan you are on are set out on the hosting page and in your account.

Fair use

Shared hosting is shared. A resource marked unlimited or unmetered means we do not meter it in normal use, not that a single account may consume a whole server. Where an account's usage degrades the service for others, we will contact you and work out a fix — a bigger plan, a caching change, a query that needs an index. Suspension without warning is reserved for the cases where the load is severe enough to be taking others down with it.

Availability

We aim for 99.9% monthly uptime on hosting, measured at the server, excluding scheduled maintenance and anything outside our control. We do not offer a contractual uptime guarantee or service credits on our standard plans, and we would rather say so here than imply one we do not stand behind. Where a written service level agreement is in place, its terms apply instead of this paragraph.

Scheduled maintenance is announced by email in advance where we expect any interruption. Emergency maintenance — a security patch that cannot wait — may be done without notice, and we will tell you afterwards.

Software you install

Where a plan lets you install your own software, keeping it updated is your responsibility. An out-of-date CMS or plugin is the single most common way a hosting account is compromised. We may suspend an account that has been compromised, or update or remove software on it, where leaving it running would put other customers or the wider internet at risk. We will tell you when we do.

We take routine backups of hosting accounts for our own disaster recovery. They exist so that we can rebuild a failed server, and we will restore from them for you where we can, as a courtesy.

Please keep your own backups as well. A backup taken for disaster recovery is not the same as a guaranteed, tested, per-customer restore point: it may be older than you expect, it may have captured a problem that had already happened, and a restore may not be possible at all after an account has been terminated. Where your data matters — and it does — the copy you control is the one that will save you.

We are not liable for loss of data, and specifically not for the cost of reconstructing it, except where the loss was caused by our gross negligence.

Anything you host with us, send through our network, or point a domain we manage at, must be lawful. In particular, you may not use our services to store, send, publish or link to:

• Material that infringes copyright, trade marks or any other intellectual property right.
• Child sexual abuse material. This is reported to the South African Police Service immediately and without notice to you, and the account is terminated. There is no other response to it.
• Material that incites violence or constitutes hate speech under the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act 4 of 2000.
• Defamatory material, or material published in breach of a court order.
• Malware, phishing pages, fraudulent stores, or anything else designed to deceive or compromise the people who visit it.
• Personal information processed in breach of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013.

You may not use our services to attack or interfere with anyone else's systems — port scanning, denial of service, unauthorised access attempts, or distributing tools whose purpose is any of those. Chapter 13 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act and the Cybercrimes Act 19 of 2020 make most of this a criminal offence, quite apart from this agreement.

Email and unsolicited messages

Bulk unsolicited email is not permitted from our network, at any volume. Section 45 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act and section 69 of the Protection of Personal Information Act both govern direct marketing to South African recipients, and section 69 is the stricter of the two: it requires the recipient's prior consent for electronic marketing unless they are an existing customer of yours, and it requires an opt-out on every message.

In practical terms: send to people who asked to hear from you, keep a record of when they asked, and honour an unsubscribe immediately. We may impose sending rate limits, and we may suspend an account whose sending is getting our mail servers blacklisted — one account's list can cost every other customer their delivery.

Open mail relays, forged headers and forged sender addresses are not permitted.

Reporting abuse

Report anything you believe breaches this section to hello@wiseguydesign.co.za. Complaints about content hosted with us are handled under the notice procedure in Chapter 11 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act. A valid notice must identify the complainant, the material and its location, and state the right infringed and the basis for the complaint. We will act on a valid notice and will pass a copy to the customer concerned so that they can respond.

Everything you upload, publish or store on our services stays yours. We claim no ownership of it.

You give us only the permission we need to run the service: to store your content, copy it for backups, transmit it to visitors, and display it. That permission ends when the content is removed or the account is closed.

You are responsible for the content and for having the rights to it. We do not monitor or pre-screen what customers host, and section 75 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act does not require us to. We do act on a valid complaint.

This website, its design, its text and the WiseGuy Design name and logo belong to us and are protected by the Copyright Act 98 of 1978 and the Trade Marks Act 194 of 1993. You may not copy, republish or reuse them without our written permission.

Work we produce for you

Copyright in a design or a codebase we build for you passes to you on full payment, and not before. Until then it is licensed to you for review only. This is deliberate and it is the norm: it is what makes an unpaid final invoice a matter that can be resolved.

Two things are carved out of that transfer, because they are not yours to receive:

• Third-party components — open-source libraries, frameworks, fonts, stock imagery and licensed plugins — remain under their own licences. Where a component carries a recurring licence fee, that fee is yours to carry once the project is delivered.
• Our own tooling — the general-purpose components, patterns and internal libraries we bring to every project — stays ours. You get an unrestricted, perpetual licence to use it in the work we delivered. We do not need your permission to use the same tooling for someone else.

Unless you tell us otherwise, we may show work we have done for you in our portfolio and describe our involvement in it. Say the word and we will not.

Delivering these services depends on other people: registries and registrars, PayFast, our infrastructure providers, mail providers, and the certificate authorities that issue TLS certificates. We choose them carefully and we remain your point of contact when something goes wrong.

What we cannot do is control them. Where a third party fails, we will tell you what happened and do what we reasonably can to put it right, but we do not accept liability for their failures beyond what we can recover from them ourselves.

Links from this site to other sites are for convenience. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices.

We may suspend or terminate a service where:

• An account is unpaid, on the timeline set out in Renewals above.
• These terms are breached, and the breach is not remedied within 7 days of us asking in writing.
• The breach is of Acceptable use and is serious enough that waiting 7 days would cause real harm — in which case we may suspend immediately and explain afterwards.
• We are required to by law, by a court order, or by a registry or registrar acting under its own rules.

You may terminate at any time, on the notice set out in Cancellation.

On termination: outstanding amounts become payable immediately; we will give you a reasonable opportunity — at least 14 days, unless the termination was for serious abuse — to retrieve your data; and after that period the account and its contents are deleted. Domains registered in your name are unaffected by the end of a hosting agreement and remain yours to move elsewhere.

We warrant that we will provide the services with reasonable skill and care, by people competent to do the work.

Beyond that, and to the fullest extent the law allows, the services are provided as they are. We do not warrant that they will be uninterrupted or error-free, that any defect can be corrected, that a website will achieve any particular ranking, traffic or commercial result, or that hosted content is immune from unauthorised access.

None of this affects the rights sections 54 to 56 of the Consumer Protection Act give you where it applies to you: services performed with reasonable care and skill, goods of good quality, and a remedy where they are not.

Nothing in this clause limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited under South African law — including liability under section 61 of the Consumer Protection Act.

Subject to that, and to the maximum extent the law allows:

1. Our total liability arising out of this agreement in any 12-month period is limited to the amounts you actually paid us for the affected service in that period.
2. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, business or anticipated savings, or for the cost of obtaining substitute services.
3. We are not liable for loss of data, except where it results from our gross negligence — and see Backups above.
4. We are not liable for a loss caused by your own act or omission, including a lapsed domain, a compromised password, out-of-date software you installed, or content you were not entitled to publish.

These limits are a deliberate allocation of risk, and they are reflected in what we charge. A service priced in the hundreds of rand a month cannot underwrite an unlimited commercial loss.

You indemnify us against any claim, loss or cost — including reasonable legal costs — arising from your content, your use of the services, your breach of these terms, or your infringement of anyone else's rights. We will tell you promptly about any such claim, and you may take over its defence provided you keep us informed and do not settle it in a way that admits liability on our part.

How we handle personal information is set out in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of this agreement.

Where you host personal information about other people on our services — customers, subscribers, staff — you are the responsible party for it under the Protection of Personal Information Act and we are your operator, processing it only on your instruction. That means the duties under section 19 of the Act to secure it, and under section 22 to report a breach of it to the affected people and to the Information Regulator, are yours. We will tell you without undue delay if we become aware of a compromise affecting your account, so that you can meet them.

Tell us first. Write to hello@wiseguydesign.co.za with what went wrong and what you would like done about it. We will acknowledge within 2 business days and give you a substantive answer within 15 business days. Most things are resolved at this step and we would like yours to be.

If that does not settle it, we will attempt in good faith to resolve the dispute by negotiation, and then by mediation if either of us asks for it, before either of us goes to court.

Where the Consumer Protection Act applies to you, none of this takes away your right to refer a complaint to the National Consumer Commission or to the relevant consumer court, and you may do so at any point.

Disputes about entitlement to a domain name go to the process for that extension rather than to us — see Domain names above.

Neither of us is liable for a failure to perform caused by something genuinely outside our control: a natural disaster, war, civil unrest, a national fibre break, a sustained utility or load-shedding failure beyond our backup capacity, a large-scale attack on infrastructure, a change in the law, or an act of a registry, registrar or government.

We will tell you what has happened and what we are doing about it. If it lasts more than 30 days, either of us may cancel the affected service and we will refund the part of it you paid for and did not receive.

We may change these terms. For a minor change — a clarification, a corrected reference — we will update the page and move the date at the top. For a change that materially affects your rights or what you pay, we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect.

If you do not accept a material change, you may cancel the affected service before it takes effect and we will refund the unused portion of anything you have prepaid, with no cancellation penalty.

We may also change how a service works — improvements, replaced components, retired features. Where a change removes something you rely on, we will give you 30 days' notice and the same right to cancel.

• Whole agreement. These terms, together with any signed quote or service agreement and our Privacy Policy, are the whole of what has been agreed, and replace anything said beforehand.
• Cession. You may not transfer your rights under this agreement without our written consent, which we will not withhold unreasonably. We may transfer ours as part of a sale or reorganisation of the business, on notice to you.
• Severability. If a court finds a clause unenforceable, that clause is severed and the rest of the agreement stands.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it. A waiver is only effective in writing.
• Notices. Notices to you go to the email address on your account. Notices to us go to hello@wiseguydesign.co.za. Email is a valid means of giving notice under this agreement and is deemed received on the day it is sent, unless it bounces.
• No partnership. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture or employment relationship between us.

This agreement is governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa.

We consent, in terms of section 45 of the Magistrates' Courts Act 32 of 1944, to the jurisdiction of the Magistrate's Court for any dispute under this agreement, even where the amount exceeds that court's normal limit. This is to your benefit as much as ours: it is the faster and cheaper forum. Either of us may still bring a matter in the High Court where it is appropriate to do so.

Questions about these terms, or about anything in them, are welcome.

Email

hello@wiseguydesign.co.za

Telephone

+27 71 613 7767

Or

use the form on our contact page