Acceptable use policy

This policy is part of our Terms of service. It applies to you and to anyone who uses your services, such as staff, your own customers, or a developer you give access to. You're responsible for them keeping to it.

Our hosting partners have their own rules, and our services must keep to them too. This policy includes them, so following this one is enough.

Report abuse of our services, such as spam or phishing from a site we host, through our contact page.

Don't use our services for anything unlawful or fraudulent, or anything that harms children, in the UK or where you are.

Content on your sites and in your email must not:

• be defamatory, obscene, pornographic, hateful, harassing or threatening;
• promote violence, or discrimination because of race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age;
• infringe anyone's copyright, trade marks or other rights, or breach a duty of confidence;
• deceive people, impersonate someone, or pretend to come from or be approved by us;
• help or encourage anything illegal, such as phishing pages, scams, or selling illegal goods.

Facts should be accurate, and opinions genuinely held.

We don't tolerate spam. Only email people who've agreed to hear from you, or who you have a genuine reason to contact, and include a way to unsubscribe in any marketing email. No bought or rented lists.

Hosting and mailboxes are for everyday business email. Bulk and marketing email, such as newsletters and mailing lists, must go through our newsletter sending or a newsletter service such as Brevo, not your hosting or mailboxes.

Newsletter sending has a fair use of 10,000 emails a month. We pause it if bounces or complaints run high, or if these rules are broken.

Don't host a website that's advertised by spam. If your service gets our servers' addresses blocklisted, we suspend it straight away, and may charge for the clean-up and for getting the addresses removed from blocklists.

Don't use our services to break into, attack, scan or overload other systems, or to spread malware. Don't try to get into other customers' accounts or our systems.

Keep your sites, plugins and passwords up to date. If your site is hacked, we may take it offline until it's clean, to protect you and other customers.

Shared hosting is for websites, sharing servers with other customers. So that one site can't slow down everyone else, on shared hosting (not a VPS or cloud server) you must not:

• use more than 10% of a server's processing power;
• run programs that keep running in the background, such as chat (IRC) servers or other daemons;
• run web crawlers or indexers;
• run BitTorrent trackers, seeds or clients, or other file sharing (peer-to-peer) software;
• run game servers or proxies;
• run scheduled tasks other than through the control panel's scheduled tasks;
• host files for other websites to use, or run your own cloud storage, such as Nextcloud or ownCloud;
• use your space as off-site storage or backup: files you upload should be part of a website;
• give away free web space or websites on your service.

Each MySQL database can be up to 1 GB. A site that mainly offers downloads, such as video or audio, may be limited to 250 GB of data transfer a month.

Search engines see your pages by default. If you work on your search ranking, follow the search engines' own guidelines.

If a site uses more than its share, we'll contact you to talk about a plan that fits. If it's harming other sites, we may limit or pause it first and tell you straight away.

Unless you have a reseller plan with us, don't resell or share our services with others as your own product.

Depending on how serious it is, we may warn you, remove the content concerned, limit or suspend the service, or end it. We may also report illegal activity to the police or other authorities, and recover our reasonable costs.

Where we can, we tell you first and give you time to put things right. For serious harm, such as spam, malware, attacks or illegal content, we act straight away and then tell you.

We may update this policy, for example when our hosting partners change their rules. We'll email you about changes that affect how you use your services.