Legal Issues, Privacy Policy, Terms of Conditions

Aaaah! Help.

[Eterion]

Question, ok, before I go live with my site, Ive noticed that a lot of websites have a link at the very bottom of their page called Legal Issues (or similar), privacy policy, terms of conditions...
Are these required by law to have on the website? And if yes, how do I get one? Do I have to write it out myself?
From what I saw looking at all these different site's policies, everyone basically has the same rules... its just a matter of a few words here and there. How do I write my TOS and what do I have to include in it?

[doingthistoolong]

You should probably read through the T&C's of a site similar to yours to see the potential issues which you need to protect against.

For my sites, the main issues are:

- Protecting myself from people stealing my content
- Informing users that I am not responsible for bad things that happen to them if they use my site.

Remember, if for example, you use shared hosting and some other webmaster leaves a security hole and your users end up with viruses you could have someone out there threatening you in some way.

When I got into this I thought it was "not the stuff" I need to worry about, but when I had 1000's of strangers walking "into my site" daily, I suddenly became VERY nervous and decided to protect myself!

[Eterion]

Shared Hosting? How does that work? I have a webhosting plan through NetSol... is that considered Shared hosting?

[JKMitchell]

"Shared Hosting" to me is where you are not the only website on the server - I would guess that most of the smaller sites are shared hosting, for example my clients sites are all on shared hosting (the servers will run 200 sites, although I don't run anywhere near this number on each server).