Acceptable Use Policy

Who it applies to

Everyone who touches the account counts: you, a developer you paid, an agency looking after the site, and anybody you handed a login to. Whatever goes out from that account is for the account holder to answer for, no matter who typed it.

The terms of service are the contract. Everything in clause 4 is written out here at length, and this page cannot permit what the contract itself refuses.

1. Never allowed

A short list, and no warning first. Anything here closes the account on the day it is found:

• child sexual abuse imagery, whatever the quantity involved;
• material that promotes terrorism or calls for violence against people;
• counterfeit login screens, copied bank sites, and fraudulent shops set up to harvest card details;
• ransomware, viruses, exploit kits, plus dumped passwords or card numbers taken from others;
• botnet command servers, plus proxies you know carry abusive traffic;
• material put online without the licence it required, once the rights owner has proved it to us; see the copyright and takedown policy;
• drugs, weapons or gambling sold into any country where you hold no licence to sell them.

Adult material that is legal may stay. Gate it by age, and do not let it into mail leaving the server.

2. What the cheap price really covers

Cheap does not mean limitless, and claiming otherwise would be exactly the sort of small print this company works to avoid. A shared plan gets you a genuine slice of a server, sized and billed as such. The whole machine is not included.

If a single account pins the processor, fills the memory or hammers the disk, every other site sharing that server slows down, which is why a ceiling exists. Work that belongs on a VPS or a dedicated server instead: video conversion, web crawling, coin mining, a public download mirror, backups of computers sitting somewhere else, and a database chewing through bulk jobs from morning to night. None of it is forbidden. It is simply the wrong product, and a message will reach you long before anything is switched off.

Where storage is called unlimited, the word covers the websites running on the plan. It does not amount to a free hard drive.

3. The updating that falls to you

The server, the web software and the control panel are our job. Anything you installed above that layer stays yours, and a plugin left at an old version is how almost every hacked account on these machines was broken into. Whatever spam or defacement follows lands against your account.

• keep site software, themes and plugins patched;
• never leave setup scripts, database dumps or .env files sitting anywhere a browser can reach them;
• hand each person their own login, and remove it when they leave;
• report anything that looks off as soon as you notice it, and do not wait for proof.

Scans and load tests against anything that is not yours require written permission from us first. Running them on your own site is fine, though tell us beforehand: the automated defences have no way to separate your test from a genuine attack.

4. Sending mail

Sending mail gets a page of its own, since a mistake there damages every customer sharing the same address range, not just whoever pressed send. Read the anti-spam policy before any message goes out to more than a few people.

5. How we handle a breach in practice

• We message you. Almost always where we start, since the root of it is usually a compromised plugin or a workload that has outgrown the plan it sits on.
• We switch something off. Where harm is running in real time, with mail flooding out, a phishing page live, or a single process eating an entire server, that one thing gets stopped while we talk it over.
• We close the account. Anything under Section 1, breaches that keep repeating, or an account causing harm while nobody answers for it.

Unlawful material is removed immediately, and reported to the authorities wherever the law requires us to report it.

6. When the call was wrong

Tell us. Answer the notice you were sent, or use the complaints procedure. Where a suspension turns out to be wrong, we lift it and credit the days lost.

7. Reporting a site

Use report abuse. Whatever you send reaches the account holder in substance, with your contact details left out unless you ask for them to be passed on, or a court orders it.

8. The company

Hosting-Cheap is the trading name used by Bohzo Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under Company No. 15031604. Registered office: The Workspace Basildon, 7 High Pavement, Basildon, England, SS14 1EA. Questions to info@hosting-cheap.com.