Acceptable use policy

The principle

You share infrastructure with other businesses. Nearly everything in this policy follows from one idea: do not do things that put other customers, our network or our reputation at risk.

Ordinary business websites never come close to any of these limits.

Prohibited content and activity

• Anything illegal under United States federal law or New York state law
• Material that infringes someone else's copyright, trademark or other rights
• Child sexual abuse material, which we report to the authorities without notice
• Malware, exploit kits, phishing pages or credential harvesting
• Unsolicited bulk email, or hosting the destination of spam sent from elsewhere
• Attacking, scanning or attempting to gain unauthorised access to any system
• Proxies, anonymisers, cryptocurrency mining and public file-sharing services
• Deliberately consuming resources in a way that degrades service for others

Resource use

Plans are sold for normal business website traffic. We do not publish a hard bandwidth cap, because for a business website that number is theatre — but the service is not intended for video hosting, large file distribution, or applications that run heavy continuous processing.

If your site grows past what a shared environment suits, we will tell you, show you the figures, and offer to scope something appropriate. We will not silently throttle you or issue a surprise invoice.

Security expectations

We harden the environment, but the site itself is a shared responsibility.

• Do not install software from untrusted sources
• Do not disable security controls we have put in place without asking us
• Use distinct, strong credentials for administrator accounts
• Tell us promptly if you think the site has been compromised

If we find your site compromised we will contact you, and where there is an active risk to other customers we may take it offline first and explain immediately afterwards.

Health and other sensitive information

Website Guardians is a general-purpose hosting service. Do not store protected health information, full payment card numbers, or government identification numbers on the hosting environment unless we have agreed in writing, in advance, that your configuration supports it.

Enforcement

Our first step is almost always an email. Where there is an immediate risk of harm, an active compromise, or a legal obligation to act, we may suspend the site first and notify you immediately afterwards.

We will tell you specifically what triggered the action and what has to change.

Reporting abuse

To report a site we host that you believe violates this policy, email [email protected] with the address and what you observed. We investigate every report.