Privacy Policy
At Host Capitol LLC we recognize that privacy is important.
This Privacy Policy applies to all products and services provided by us.
PRIVACY POLICY
Last revision: July 22, 2018
HostCapitol.com (“Host Capitol”, “HostCapitol”, “us”, “we”, “our”, or the “Service”) has developed this privacy statement to validate our commitment to confidentiality to all of our clients who use Host Capitol’s online services (“Services”) which include Domain Registrations/Transfers/Management, Shared Hosting, Semi-Dedicated Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Virtual Private Servers, Dedicated Servers and Data Backups.
In our Privacy Policy, when we refer to “Users”, we mean our customers who use our Services, including visitors to our sites. The users, visitors and customers of, our Users’ sites are “End Users”.
In alignment with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union, this privacy statement provides our visitors and clients with information on how and why we collect information and consequently, how the collected information is being protected.
Data
If you are a citizen or resident of the European Union (EU), in relation to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union, please be aware that Host Capitol is a United States based hosting company, and in order to communicate with you and to provide our Services and related support, it is necessary for us to transfer and store your personal data outside of the European Union.
We provide our Services in a number of global locations. If you have selected a non-EU based server to deploy your Services in, any data that you upload and store on your Services would naturally be stored outside of the European Union.
In order to protect against complete data loss due to hardware failure or other events, which can be detrimental to the provided Services, we use a combination of cPanel and R1Soft CDP Backup software to run routine backups and store them onto remote backup servers for redundancy purposes. These backup servers may be located outside of the European Union.
Information Collected
Host Capitol requests and gathers information from our clients in a few ways. These include online data entry forms when ordering any of our Services, communication with our staff, as well as other instances where our clients can volunteer their own private information.
The information collected can include but is not limited to the following:
a. Your identity – This includes your First and Last Name, Company Name (if applicable), Physical Address(es), Email Address(es), IP Address(es), Telephone Number(s), and limited information about your payment card from our payment processor, such as the last four digits, the country of issuance and the expiration date.
b. Your interaction with us – This includes emails you send to us, phone calls, exchanges you make with us through our live chat system, exchanges you make with us through any of our official social media platforms, and exchanges you make with us through our support ticket system.
c. Identifiable trackers – This includes cookies and other similar means. We use cookies and similar tracking technologies to track the activity on our Service and hold certain information.
Cookies are files with small amount of data which may include an anonymous unique identifier. Cookies are sent to your browser from a website and stored on your device. Tracking technologies also used are beacons, tags, and scripts to collect and track information and to improve and analyze our Service.
You can instruct your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, if you do not accept cookies, you may not be able to use some portions of our Service.
Examples of Cookies we use:
Session Cookies. We use Session Cookies to operate our Service.
Preference Cookies. We use Preference Cookies to remember your preferences and various settings.
Security Cookies. We use Security Cookies for security purposes.
d. Non-identifiable trackers – This includes log files and other similar means. Due to their nature, they are not linked to personally identifiable information.
Use of Information
We only use and process personal information for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. In addition to the above, such purposes include:
Sending Emails
We use emails to communicate with you, to confirm your placed orders, and to send information that you have requested. There are two types of email communications that we provide, as outlined above. One type of e-mail is legally required. Legally required emails cover ICANN mandated verification emails, renewal notices and any other policy or procedure created by ICANN which governs the purchase of domains. Additionally, we may be required by law to serve notices to you such as DMCA Takedown Notices, UDRP notices, etc. Or, we may deem a change to one of our policies to be material and, therefore, determine a duty (though not a legal requirement) to inform you of this change. These types of communications do not fall under any of our opt-out procedures.
We do our best to limit promotional types of emails to communications that we believe will be useful to you. These cover special offers, new products and services and other benefits that we try to ensure would be beneficial to you. To receive our promotional emails, including our newsletters, you must opt-in when signing up or through your account. You have the ability to opt-out of these communications under your profile settings in our client portal or by unsubscribing directly through the unsubscribe link located at the bottom of all promotional emails.Newsletters
As of September 2017, Host Capitol will send a monthly newsletter to all its clients and those who directly subscribe to its newsletters through hostcapitol.com. As of May 25, 2018, all promotional communications, including our newsletters, are opt-in only.
You can easily opt-out of receiving our newsletters through under your profile settings in our client portal. You can just as easily unsubscribe directly through the unsubscribe link located at the bottom of all newsletters.Domain WhoIs Contact Information
We are required by ICANN guidelines, and/or the Registries who issue domains, to collect and retain certain personally identifiable information. This information is required to be kept current and may be accessed for changes through your customer Account Panel. This information is further required by law to be made publically available unless you choose to use a privacy service to anonymize the information, such as WhoisGuard. Finally, ICANN requires that registrars must retain the Whois information, whether or not protected by a privacy service, for two (2) years after the domain expires or you are no longer the registrant.
Because domain name registration information is available to the public, anyone can access it through “Whois” searches. At times, our customers may be included within these searches. However, the spam they receive does not in any way come from Host Capitol and please note that we have no control over this information once it is available to the public.
WhoIs contact information, which is protected by a privacy service, will be governed by the disclosure guidelines of the privacy service provider. We use a third party provider called Directi for our domain name registration services. You can choose to utilize WhoIs protection to protect personal information provided through domain WhoIs.
WHOIS data for EU customers will always be masked regardless of whether or not Privacy Protection is enabled.Personal Information Following Termination of Account
When your Host Capitol account is cancelled (either voluntarily or involuntarily) all of your personally identifiable information is placed in “deactivated” status within our corresponding databases. However, you should know that deactivation of your account does not mean your personally identifiable information has been deleted from our database entirely. We will retain and use your personally identifiable information, if necessary, in order to resolve disputes, enforce our agreements and/or as required by laws or regulations.
Contests
From time to time our site requests information from users via surveys or contests is completely voluntary, and the user, therefor, has a choice whether or not to respond and disclose this information. Information requested may include contact information (such as name, email address, shipping address, and demographic information such as zip code and age level). Contact information will be used to notify the winners and award prizes. Survey information will be used for purposes of monitoring or improving the use and satisfaction of this site and/or any other purpose that we explicitly disclose in the contest rules.
Testimonials
We post customer testimonials on our website which may contain personally identifiable information. We do obtain the customer’s consent via email, prior to posting the testimonial, to post their name along with their testimonial. If you would like to request the removal of your testimonial from the site, please contact us at privacy@hostcapitol.com.
Public Blog
Our website offers a publicly accessible blog. You should be aware that any information you provide in this area, such as the comments section, may be read, collected, and used by others who access it. To request the removal of your personal information from our blog, contact us at privacy@hostcapitol.com. In some cases, we may not be able to remove your personal information. If this occurs, we will let you know if we are unable to do so and why.
Other Instances
As described in the Information Sharing Section below, and as described in the respective terms of each of our services and in the Host Capitol, LLC Terms of Service.
We process your personal information for the above purposes when:
Consent. You have consented to the use of your personal information in a particular way. When you consent, you can change your mind at any time.
Performance of a contract. We need your personal information to provide you with services and products requested by you, or to respond to your inquiries. In other words, so we can perform our contract with you or take steps at your request before entering into one. For example, we need your email address so you can sign in to your Host Capitol account.
Legal obligation. We have a legal obligation to use your personal information, such as to comply with applicable tax and other government regulations or to comply with a court order or binding law enforcement request.
Legitimate interests. We have a legitimate interest in using your personal information. In particular, we have a legitimate interest in the following cases:
To operate the Host Capitol business and provide you with tailored advertising and communications to develop and promote our business.
To analyze and improve the safety and security of our Services – we do this as it is necessary to pursue our legitimate interests in ensuring Host Capitol is secure, such as by implementing and enhancing security measures and protections and protecting against fraud, spam and abuse.
To provide and improve the Services, including any personalized services – we do this as it is necessary to pursue our legitimate interests of providing an innovative and tailored offering to our Users on a sustained basis.
To share your personal information with other Host Capitol group companies that help us provide and improve the Services.
To anonymize and subsequently use anonymized information.
Protecting you and others. To protect your vital interests, or those of others
Others’ legitimate interests. Where necessary for the purposes of a third party’s legitimate interests, such as our partners who have a legitimate interest in delivering tailored advertising to you and monitoring and measuring its effectiveness or our Users who have a legitimate interest in having their sites function properly and securely and analyzing the usage of their sites so they can understand trends and improve their services.
No-Spam Policy
We have a strict No-Spam Policy prohibiting the use of any data collected to send spam. We will not sell any contact information to third parties.
Choices for Personal Information
When you sign up for a particular service that requires registration, we ask you to provide personal information. If we use this information in a manner different than the purpose defined herein and in the terms of the services offered then we will ask for your consent prior to such use. Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies, but you can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, some of our features and services may not function properly if your cookies are disabled. You can decline to submit personal information to any of our services, in which case we may not be able to provide those services to you.
Disclosure of Data
We do not disclose our clients’ personal information with third parties, with the exception of the following reasons:
To provide any of our Services to our clients.
Sharing the information with our subsidiaries, affiliated companies or other trusted businesses or persons for the purpose of processing personal information on our behalf. We require that these parties agree to process such information based on our instructions and in compliance with this Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to:
(a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request,
(b) enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations thereof,
(c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, or
(d) protect against harm to rights, property or safety, of our users, us or the public as required or permitted by law.Advertising. We share personal information with third parties so they and we can provide you with tailored advertising and measure and monitor its effectiveness. For example, we may share your pseudonymized email address with a third party social media platform on which we advertise to avoid serving Host Capitol ads to people who already use Host Capitol.
Business Transfers. If Host Capitol, or substantially all of its assets, were acquired, or in the unlikely event that Host Capitol goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of Host Capitol may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.
We may share with third parties certain pieces of aggregated, non-personal information, such as the number of users by demographic. Such information does not identify you individually.
Third Party Data Processors Used by Host Capitol
Note: This list of third party services used by Host Capitol may change at any time without prior notice. A current list of contractors and/or sub-processors is available on request to privacy@hostcapitol.com.
To render any or all of its services to the customer, Host Capitol may use services provided by the following third parties if necessary:
Fraudrecord.com, for the purposes of automatic fraud checks against publicly available databases as described in the Terms of Service.
Maxmind.com, for the purposes of automatic fraud checks against publicly available databases as described in the Terms of Service.
Tawk.to, to provide our website live chat services.
Enom.com, for domain services (registration, transfer, etc.).
Namecheap.com, for domain services (registration, transfer, etc.).
P.D.R Solutions (U.S.) LLC, for domain name services (registration, transfer, etc.) and miscellaneous web hosting related services.
Comodo.com, for website security services, such as SSL Certificates.
Google, for data analytics (Google Analytics). Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google uses the data collected to track and monitor the use of our Service. This data is shared with other Google services. Google may use the collected data to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network.
You can opt-out of having made your activity on the Service available to Google Analytics by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. The add-on prevents the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js, and dc.js) from sharing information with Google Analytics about visits activity.
For more information on the privacy practices of Google, please visit the Google Privacy & Terms web page: http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/
Facebook, for data analytics. Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool that allows us to measure the effectiveness of our advertising by understanding the actions people take on our website.
You can opt-out of having made your activity on the Service available to Facebook by adjusting your Facebook ad preferences at:
https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=ad_settings_screenFor more information on the privacy practices of Facebook in light of GDPR, please visit:
https://www.facebook.com/business/gdprHubSpot, for data analytics and communication. We will not store the personal contact information of any EU client on HubSpot unless specifically provided under the positive agreement of our Privacy Policy.
LinkedIn, for ad conversion tracking. LinkedIn conversion tracking is a code that allows us to measure the effectiveness of our advertising by understanding the actions people take on our website.
For more information on LinkedIn’s cookie policy and to opt out, please visit:
https://www.linkedin.com/legal/cookie-policyAddtoany.com, to enable social sharing functionality for several pages on our website, including announcements and blog posts.
For more information on the privacy practices of AddToAny, please visit the AddToAny Privacy Policy web page: https://www.addtoany.com/privacy
-
Hotjar.com, in order to better understand our users’ needs and to optimize this service and experience. Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback. Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behavior and their devices (in particular device’s IP address (captured and stored only in anonymized form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), preferred language used to display our website). Hotjar stores this information in a pseudonymized user profile. Neither Hotjar nor we will ever use this information to identify individual users or to match it with further data on an individual user. For further details, please see Hotjar’s privacy policy at: https://www.hotjar.com/legal/policies/privacy.
You can opt-out to the creation of a user profile, Hotjar’s storing of data about your usage of our site and Hotjar’s use of tracking cookies on other websites at: https://www.hotjar.com/legal/compliance/opt-out.
Stripe
Their Privacy Policy can be viewed at https://stripe.com/us/privacyPayPal
Their Privacy Policy can be viewed at https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-fullWe use the data you submit only for purposes identified under the “Use of Information” section of this privacy policy.
You have the right to review your personal data that Host Capitol holds and check it for accuracy.
You have the right to correct data in the case that errors may be found in our records.
You have the right to request that any of your personal data be erased. i.e. right to be forgotten.
You have the right to obtain and reuse your personal data for your own purposes.
You have the right to request that Host Capitol restrict the processing of your personal data under certain circumstances.
You have the right to object to our processing of your personal data.
In order to better serve our customers and to improve our business and its services, we may use services provided by the following third parties if necessary:
Payments
We may provide paid products and/or services within the Service. In that case, we use third-party services for payment processing (e.g. payment processors).
Payment card details are provided directly to our third-party payment processors whose use of your personal information and whose use of your personal information is governed by their Privacy Policy. These payment processors adhere to the standards set by PCI-DSS as managed by the PCI Security Standards Council, which is a joint effort of brands like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover. PCI-DSS requirements help ensure the secure handling of payment information.
The payment processors we work with are:
Information Security
We have taken reasonable steps to help protect the personal information we collect. These measures include using SSL encryption and two-factor authentication. Unfortunately, no measures can be guaranteed to provide 100% security. Accordingly, we cannot guarantee the security of your information in all circumstances.
You should take steps to protect against unauthorized access to your device and account(s) by, among other things, choosing a robust password that nobody else knows or can easily guess and keeping your log-in and password private. We are not responsible for any lost, stolen, or compromised passwords or for any activity on your account(s) via unauthorized password activity.
Children
This website is not directed towards children and we do not seek to collect any personal information from children. If we become aware that personal information from a child under the age of 13 has been collected, we will use all reasonable efforts to delete such information from our database.
Accessing and Updating Personal Information
When you use our services, we make good faith efforts to provide you with access to your personal information and to correct this data if it is inaccurate.
Duration of Storage
Host Capitol will only store your data as long as required by the basis for processing. For example, Host Capitol will only store personal data that is being processed pursuant to Host Capitol’s legitimate interest so long as such interest is present. If Host Capitol is processing personal data based on consent, that consent may be withdrawn by you at any time. Please contact privacy@hostcapitol.com to withdraw such consent.
Reseller Relations
In addition to all of the terms and conditions set forth above, the following terms apply to you if you are a reseller (“Reseller”).
Information Related to Data Collected through Resellers. We may collect information under the direction of our Resellers, but we have no direct relationship with the our Resellers’ client, customers or users (“Reseller Users”) or the personal data provided, processed or obtained by our Resellers. Reseller Users should direct all queries to the Reseller.
Choice. Reseller Users who would no longer like to be contacted by such Reseller, should contact the Reseller from whom such Reseller User purchased products or services.
Data Retention. We retain personal data we process on behalf of our Resellers for as long as needed to provide services under the relationship. We will retain, use and disclose this personal information as necessary (i) to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes and enforce our agreements, and (ii) as described in this Policy, to disclose information to service providers and for domain registration and legal and compliance reasons.
Your rights as a Data Subject
Host Capitol is committed to fulfilling its obligations concerning the exercise of your rights under GDPR. Please be advised that you have the following rights under GDPR (to the extent GDPR applies to your personal data):
Changes to this Privacy Policy
If we make material changes to our privacy policy, we will inform customers by publishing an announcement on our online portals.
Contact Us
If you have any inquires, or questions regarding our privacy policy, please email us at privacy@hostcapitol.com or write to us at the following address.
Louis Kohman
Data Protection Officer
Host Capitol LLC
200 Centennial Ave, Suite 200 – #255
Piscataway, New Jersey 08854
United States of America