Acceptable Use Policy

Section 4 of the terms of service compresses the whole question of what you may run here into a single paragraph. Below, that paragraph is written out in full. If the two ever conflict, the contract governs; nothing on this page enlarges the permission it grants.

This applies on every plan, to each client you resell to, and to anyone you give a control-panel or FTP login. Traffic leaving an account is that account's responsibility, even where somebody else was the one who generated it.

1. Content that cannot be hosted here

Part of the list is criminal. The remainder will get a whole IP range blocked, and every other site on that range suffers for it. Either way, the account goes:

• child sexual abuse material, whatever the format and however little of it;
• content that incites terrorism, or violence against a person or a group;
• material put up in breach of somebody else's copyright, trade mark or database right, where the copyright and takedown policy explains the route a rights holder takes to complain;
• phishing pages, forged login screens, and anything else assembled to harvest credentials;
• malware, exploit kits, credential-stuffing lists, and payment data lifted from elsewhere;
• botnet command-and-control endpoints, and proxies operated in full knowledge of the abuse;
• pharmacy, weapons or gambling businesses without a licence, pointed at jurisdictions where that trade is illegal.

Adult content sits outside that list, provided it is lawful both where it was made and where it is read. Two conditions follow. Put an age gate in front of it, and do not let it be what drags our address space onto a blocklist.

2. What fair use means on shared plans

On shared and reseller plans, a great many sites live on the same machine, which means one account cannot be permitted to swallow it. What that rules out: holding the processor, the memory, disk throughput or the process count at saturation for long stretches, and using the plan as if you had bought a server outright.

Some work belongs on a VPS or a dedicated machine rather than here: video transcoding, crawlers that run for hours, cryptocurrency mining, public file drops, backup mirrors for systems that live somewhere else, and any database chewing through bulk jobs without pause. Once a workload is what makes the sites next door slow down, it has to move. You will get a message from us before we switch anything off.

Where storage is described as unlimited, that applies to the website content held on the account. It is not a drive for whatever you like.

3. Mail

All the rules on sending sit inside the anti-spam policy, since mail nobody asked for is the fastest way to get an IP range delisted, and the topic deserves its own page. Put briefly: write only to people who asked you to, act on an unsubscribe as soon as it lands, and never relay for a third party whose conduct you cannot vouch for.

4. The security duties you carry yourself

Patching the platform is our job. Whatever you installed on top of it is yours to keep current. A plugin left at an old version is the usual way an account here gets taken over, and the mail or defacement that follows lands against your name.

• install updates for applications, themes and plugins;
• strip out installers, database dumps and .env files left lying in a web root;
• pick passwords that appear nowhere else, and cancel a login when someone leaves;
• let us know at once if you suspect an account has been breached.

Probing, scanning or load-testing any infrastructure you do not own, ours included, calls for written permission beforehand. Testing your own site is another matter, and allowed. Warn us before you run anything that looks like an attack, or the automated defences will answer on our behalf.

5. How we respond to a breach of this policy

We try to keep the response in proportion to what happened, and in most cases it starts with a message rather than a switch:

• We ask. Most come down to a hacked plugin or a workload someone misjudged, and an email settles it.
• We isolate. Where something is doing live harm to other customers, an outbound spam run, a phishing page still serving, a process eating an entire node, we suspend that item or that account while the conversation happens.
• We terminate. Reserved for anything in section 1, for breaches that keep repeating, and for account holders who cannot be reached while damage continues.

Illegal content comes down with no warning, and where a statute demands it, we report the matter. None of this obliges us to hold off, because holding off would make us part of the harm.

6. Disagreeing with a decision

People decide suspensions, and people make mistakes. Answer the notice you were sent, or put the whole case through the complaints procedure. Where a suspension turns out to be wrong, we lift it and credit the time lost.

7. Reporting a breach

To flag anything hosted with us, use abuse reports. We put the substance of your report to the account holder. Your contact details do not travel with it, unless you tell us to pass them on or a legal duty makes us.

8. Who this is with

Hosting & Domains is a trading name of Azaanex Inc., a company registered in Canada under Company No. 1766541-5. Registered office: 5-145 1/2 Church St, Toronto, Ontario M5B 1Y4, Canada. Send any question about this policy to info@hosting-n-domains.com.