Fair Usage Policy

This Fair Usage Policy applies to Parish Council, Community & Charity website support only. We design tailor-made support contracts for each of our Bespoke Business Websites so the following policy does not apply.

ThenMedia is proud to offer lifetime unmetered support and unlimited file storage to our customers. We pride ourselves on being helpful and accommodating to our customers' needs wherever possible. To ensure our open flexible arrangement isn't abused, both our support and data storage is subject to the following Fair Usage Policy.

Website Support

'Lifetime' means support is not limited to a certain number of days or weeks but will extend for the lifetime of your project with us.'Unmetered' means we don't log support time given to any customer. Customers have no maximum number of support hours that they use up when contacting us.'Support' means we will help you to manage and edit your website; it doesn't mean we will manage and edit it for you.

Notwithstanding the above, ThenMedia reserves the right to defer support to any customer who abuses this service with support requests considered above and beyond fair use. To date, we have never exercised this right.

Support hours are between 09:00 – 17:00 Monday – Friday. We aim to answer all support email requests within 48 hours, although some issues will take longer to resolve than others. In the unusual case that all our team are unavailable to answer your call, you can leave a voicemail and we will then attend to your request within the 48 hour window in the same way we respond to email requests.

Support Example: Creating new pages on your website

What we will do: We'll provide advice on how best to present your new page, ensuring it's mobile friendly and WCAG compliant. We'll also run through the editing process with you over the phone. Where necessary we'll create an example page and build a new template or layout to meet the requirements of your new page (within the framework of our system). We're more than happy to run through the process several times if you forget what to do!

What we won't do: We won't accept a pile of emails or documents with the instruction 'can you add all this to our website please'. Also we won't create dynamic pages or bespoke apps which require specialist programming and fall outside the feature set of your tier.

Website Training

As well as ongoing support, ThenMedia will provide a Zoom/Skype training session to a group of website administrators to get them started with our content management system. This can be repeated periodically if new administrators join your team. Please note we don't currently provide on-site training.

Website Storage

ThenMedia will provide storage on our servers to accommodate your community website. This means that documents, images, videos and pages generated by regular use of your community website will never be restricted. Tier 1 customers do have certain restrictions which are clearly outlined on our website.

What is regular use?

It is important to explain what we mean by 'regular use'. Let's assume you add between 1 – 20 news articles each week. Each article might include several photographs, you might also add a gallery of photos each week. A gallery might have around 30 photographs. This means a large active community website could be uploading between 20 – 80 photographs each week and generating around 20 – 30 new webpages. This would be fine.However if you find you need to add more photographs than this, we would help you to integrate an external gallery such as Flickr or Instagram. This would help to ensure your website continues to run quickly and efficiently.

File Storage

We would expect a community website to include numerous downloadable files such as meeting minutes or agendas. If you were to upload around 10 – 30 PDFs, spreadsheets or Word Documents every week this would be fine.However, our system shouldn't be used as Cloud Storage. We are not providing an equivalent service to DropBox or GoogleDrive. If you were to start uploading hundreds of megabytes of archived material, storing councillors private documents or archiving large presentations this would be considered unfair usage.

Housekeeping

To ensure your website runs quickly and your content remains accessible, we will assist you in archiving or removing out-of-date or redundant content where appropriate. Keeping your content tidy and properly indexed benefits your administrators, your visitors and the server infrastructure. As your site grows, our team is happy to work with you to achieve this.

Managing your data

We create regular backups to protect your data. To find out more about our backup system, please read our Data Backup Policy. For more information on how your data is stored and managed, please read our GDPR Data Privacy Policy.