Acceptable Use Policy

1. Scope and who this applies to

This Acceptable Use Policy (the "Policy") sets out the terms on which you may use the hosting, email, domain and related services (the "Services") supplied by Snappy Host Ltd ("Snappyhost", "we", "us", "our"). In this Policy, "you" and "your" mean the account holder and any agent, employee or other person authorised to act on your behalf.

This Policy forms part of your agreement with us and is incorporated into our Terms of Service. Where the two conflict, the Terms of Service take precedence. Our Privacy Policy also applies.

It covers everything on your account, whether you put it there or not. If you resell our services, run an agency account or host sites for clients, you are responsible for your customers' compliance as if it were your own, and you must pass equivalent terms on to them. See clause 17.

By ordering or using the Services, or by allowing anyone else to use your account, you accept this Policy.

2. Your obligations

You confirm that you own the content on your account or have written permission from the owner to store, publish and display it, and that it does not infringe anyone's intellectual property, contract or other rights, or breach any applicable law.

You are responsible for all activity on your account, including activity by your staff, clients, visitors and anyone using your credentials, whether or not you authorised it.

Where you process personal data through the Services, you are the data controller and we act as your processor. You are responsible for having a lawful basis for that processing, for answering the rights requests of the people whose data it is, and for complying with the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.

You grant us a licence to cache, copy, transmit and store your content to the extent needed to provide the Services, to take and restore backups, and to meet a legal obligation. The licence is limited to operating the Services and ends when your content is removed from our systems.

3. Prohibited content

You must not use the Services to store, publish, link to or transmit:

• Child sexual abuse material. This is reported to the Internet Watch Foundation and to law enforcement without exception, without notice and without refund.
• Terrorist content, or material inciting or glorifying terrorism.
• Content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, threatening, or that incites violence or hatred against any group or individual.
• Extreme pornography, or any adult content involving people who are not consenting adults. Lawful adult content requires our prior written agreement and is not permitted on shared plans.
• Material that infringes copyright, trade marks, patents, database rights, trade secrets or other intellectual property, including warez, cracks, key generators, serial numbers and pirated media or software.
• Malware, viruses, trojans, worms, ransomware, rootkits, keyloggers, exploit kits, botnet controllers and phishing pages, whether live or stored inactive.
• Fraudulent schemes, including pyramid and matrix schemes, multi-level marketing, high-yield investment programmes, Ponzi schemes, get-rich-quick offers, fake shops and counterfeit goods.
• Unlicensed financial, investment, insurance or credit services, unlicensed pharmacies, and the sale of controlled substances, weapons or age-restricted goods without the relevant permits, which must be supplied to us in advance on request.
• Unlicensed gambling, lottery, casino or betting services.
• Content that breaches UK sanctions or export controls, or that is supplied to a sanctioned person or entity.
• Torrent trackers and portals, and open proxies, VPN endpoints, TOR relays or exit nodes and other traffic-relaying services.

This list is not exhaustive. We may treat other content as prohibited where, acting reasonably, we consider it unlawful or harmful to us, to our other customers or to the public.

4. Prohibited activities

You must not, and must not permit anyone else to:

• Break any law or regulation applicable to you or to us, including the law of England and Wales and the law of any other country you operate in or target.
• Send spam or unsolicited bulk or commercial messages, or run mail bombing. See clause 5.
• Gain or attempt to gain unauthorised access to any system, account, network or data, whether ours or anyone else's, including your neighbours on a shared server.
• Run port scans, vulnerability scans, penetration tests, brute-force or credential-stuffing tools, IP scanners, packet sniffers or similar against any system without our prior written consent and the target's documented authorisation.
• Take part in, launch or facilitate denial-of-service or distributed denial-of-service activity, including amplification and reflection attacks.
• Forge headers, signatures, identifiers or any other data, or otherwise misrepresent who you are or where traffic originates.
• Escape, disable or work around the account isolation, resource controls or security controls on our platform, whether through PHP, SSH or any other means. Attempting to do so is grounds for immediate termination.
• Mine cryptocurrency, run distributed computing or blockchain nodes, or otherwise use the Services mainly to consume processing power rather than to serve a website.
• Run web spiders, crawlers, scrapers, indexers or automated bulk data collection, including large-scale scraping to build AI or machine learning training sets.
• Operate IRC servers, bots or clients, game servers, streaming servers, or any stand-alone unattended server-side process or daemon on a shared plan.
• Use the Services as a file store, backup target, mirror, image or video host, cloud storage service, or content delivery endpoint for sites hosted elsewhere. See clause 6.
• Cause, or risk causing, our IP addresses or ranges to be blacklisted or reputation-scored by any spam, malware or security service.
• Resell, sublicense or share the Services outside the terms of a reseller or agency plan bought for that purpose.

5. Email, marketing and anti-spam

We take spam extremely seriously. One spam run from a shared server can get an entire IP range blacklisted and stop mail working for every other customer on it, so enforcement here is strict.

5.1 The law you must comply with

If you send marketing email from our network you must comply with the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR), the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and with equivalent law in any country you send to, including the EU GDPR and, for US recipients, the CAN-SPAM Act 2003.

In practice that means a recipient must have given consent, or must be an existing customer of yours who bought a similar product and was given a clear chance to opt out (the soft opt-in). Every message must identify you and must carry a working unsubscribe that is honoured promptly.

5.2 Proof of consent

You must keep complete and accurate records of consent and opt-in for every address you mail, and produce them to us on request. If you cannot produce verifiable proof of consent for a send, we will treat that send as unsolicited. Purchased, rented, harvested, scraped and appended lists never satisfy this and are prohibited outright.

5.3 Specifically prohibited

• Sending unsolicited bulk or commercial email, whether from our network or elsewhere.
• Using our network to receive replies, bounces or traffic generated by spam sent from anywhere else.
• Forging or spoofing email headers, envelope senders or return paths.
• Running or using open relays, open proxies, proxy lists or third-party proxy mailing software.
• Configuring a mail server to accept and relay third-party mail without authentication.
• Hosting a page, form, image, script or redirect advertised by spam sent from any network (spamvertising), even where the spam itself came from somewhere else.
• Hosting or providing any service that supports spamming, including list-washing, address harvesting and bulk mailer distribution.
• Sending unsolicited bulk messages by any other channel, including SMS, instant messaging, IRC, blog and forum posts, guestbook entries, referrer spam, usenet and pop-ups.

5.4 Volume and rate limits

We may queue, rate-limit, reject or block any message, and may cap the volume you send, at any time and without notice, to protect the platform and our sending reputation. Bulk and marketing sending belongs with a dedicated email service provider rather than a shared hosting mail server.

If you need to send at volume, talk to us first and we will point you at the right setup rather than let you trip a limit mid-campaign.

5.5 Costs of dealing with spam

Clearing up after a spam incident is real work: delisting IP addresses, rebuilding sender reputation, handling complaints and investigating the account. Where we determine that you have deliberately or recklessly used the Services to send spam, we may charge £500 towards the administrative cost of that work, to the payment details on your account. This is a genuine pre-estimate of our costs rather than a penalty; where the actual cost is lower we will charge the lower amount, and we will always tell you what the charge is for.

We may also share details of the activity, including your identity, with anti-spam organisations and blacklist operators.

6. Fair use and resource limits

Shared, reseller and agency plans put many customers on the same hardware. Fair use is what keeps that fast for everybody, so these limits exist to protect your neighbours, not to catch you out.

6.1 What unlimited means

Where a plan is described as offering unlimited storage or bandwidth, that applies to normal website use by a site of ordinary size and design. It is not an invitation to run a file distribution, archiving or media streaming platform, and it is subject to the specific caps set out below and to the resource allocation published for your plan.

6.2 Processing and platform load

On shared, reseller and agency plans you must not:

• Use more than 10% of a server's processing capacity, or exceed the CPU, memory, entry process or I/O allocation published for your plan.
• Run stand-alone or unattended server-side processes or daemons.
• Run scheduled tasks other than through the control panel, or run them more often than every five minutes.
• Run spiders, indexers, IRC software, bit torrent applications, trackers or clients, or take part in peer-to-peer file sharing. You may link to lawful torrent files hosted elsewhere.
• Run game servers or game-related services.
• Operate a proxy site or service, act as a remote file host for other websites, or run self-hosted file sync and cloud storage software such as ownCloud, Nextcloud, Pydio or Sparkleshare.

Accounts that exceed their resource limits, whether measured by LVE faults or by our own monitoring, may be suspended pending investigation. We may burst an account above its allocation at our discretion to keep a service stable, but sustained reliance on burst capacity means the account needs a larger plan.

6.3 Storage limits

Content on your account must form part of a website reachable from the public web. The Services are not a backup or archiving facility, and files not needed to operate your site may be removed. Within your overall allowance:

• Up to 5GB may be audio, video and other multimedia files, including .aac, .avi, .mp3, .mp4, .mpeg, .jpg, .png and .gif.
• Up to 5GB may be archives and disk images.
• Up to 1GB may be databases and database dumps, including .sql files. An individual MySQL database may be limited to 1024MB.
• Up to 1GB may be executables and other compiled output.
• Sites offering audio or video downloads may be limited to 10GB in total.

6.4 When you outgrow a plan

If your account consistently needs more than its plan provides, we will contact you to agree an upgrade or an alternative, which may carry a different charge. Where usage is causing live harm to other customers on the same server we may act first and explain immediately afterwards.

7. Backups and data retention

Backups are our safety net, not a substitute for yours. You remain responsible for keeping independent copies of anything you cannot afford to lose.

Where a plan includes automatic backups, our standard shared schedule is daily backups retained for 30 days, stored off-site and restorable from your control panel. Backups are only included where the product page for your plan says so. VPS and dedicated servers are not backed up by us unless you buy a backup service.

Backup plugins must not store local copies inside your account quota. Send them to an external destination such as Google Drive or S3. Local backup archives may be removed, and repeat offenders may be suspended.

The following are excluded from our backups, and may also be removed from account storage where needed to keep a shared server stable:

*.swf  *.flv  *.exe  *.xen  *.iso  *.7z  *.tar  *.jpa
*.wpress  *.tar.gz  *.zip  *.mp4  *.mp3  *.wav
backup-*.tar.gz  cpmove-*.tar.gz  site-*.tar.gz
.MirrorSearch
*/com_akeeba/backup/*
*/backupbuddy_backups/*
*/.wysiwygPro_*
*/core.[0-9]*
public_html/cache/*
tmp/*  logs/*
.cagefs  .cagefs*
.cpan  .cpanel/caches  .cpanel/datastore  .cpcpan
.sqmailattach  .cpanel/*.sock
access-logs/*  */error_log  public_ftp/*
softaculous_backups/*
*/wp-content/uploads/wpcf7_captcha/*
*/wp-content/widget-cache/*
*/wp-content/cache/*
*/wptsc-cachedir/*
mail/*/*/.Trash/*  mail/*/*/.Drafts/*
mail/.Drafts/*  mail/.Trash/*

When an account is terminated or removed, whether by us or by you, and whether deliberately or in error, any remaining backup is deleted as part of routine housekeeping. We do not commit to holding one for any period and you should not rely on being able to recover data after your account ends. The standard retention schedule does not apply after removal, and Softaculous backups are deleted with the account.

We make every effort to keep backups complete and usable, but we cannot be held responsible where backup data is missing or corrupt.

8. Email service limits

So that mail stays responsive for everyone:

• Each mailbox on a shared hosting account is limited to 10GB of storage. You can create as many mailboxes as you need; the limit is per mailbox, not a total across the account.
• IMAP and POP3 clients may check for new mail up to 100 times per hour.
• POP3 allows up to 10 concurrent connections per IP address on shared and agency plans, and up to 20 on business and email plans.
• IMAP allows up to 30 concurrent connections per IP address on shared, agency, business and email plans.

We may limit, queue or block message delivery at our discretion to protect the platform, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, including lost profits, arising from mail being queued or blocked.

Where usage consistently exceeds these limits, the account may need to move to a VPS or a dedicated mail service.

9. Security and compromised accounts

Security is a shared job. Ours is the platform; yours is what runs on it.

You must keep your applications, themes, plugins and libraries patched, use strong and unique credentials, enable two-factor authentication where it is offered, and keep your login details confidential. Tell us straight away if you think your account has been compromised.

If a site on your account is compromised and is putting other customers, our network or the public at risk, for example by serving malware, hosting a phishing page or sending spam, we may isolate or suspend it immediately and without notice. We will tell you what we found and help you get cleaned up and back online.

We may scan accounts for malware, known-vulnerable software and indicators of compromise, and may quarantine or remove files identified as malicious. Quarantined files are not guaranteed to be recoverable.

You bear the risk of loss or damage to your content, and you are responsible for its confidentiality, integrity and independent backup.

If you find a security vulnerability in our platform, please report it to [email protected] and give us a fair chance to fix it before disclosing it. We will not pursue anyone who reports a genuine issue in good faith and does not access, alter or remove other people's data.

10. IP addresses

Any IP address we assign to you remains ours. You have no right to use it except as part of the Services, you cannot transfer or sell it, and it does not move with you if you leave.

Because IPv4 space is exhausted we allocate it sparingly. Shared hosting accounts may use one IP address. The limit is per account rather than per customer, and additional addresses are chargeable and issued only where you can justify the need.

11. Bandwidth and disk space

Bandwidth is unlimited and we do not meter your traffic or bill you for it. It is subject to the fair use and resource limits in clause 6, which exist so that one account cannot slow down its neighbours on shared hardware. If normal use of your site ever became a problem for the server it sits on, we would talk to you and help you move to the right plan rather than cut you off without warning.

Disk space is allocated according to your plan. On a VPS, part of the disk is used by the operating system and is not available for your content, so the usable figure is a little lower than the headline size.

12. VPS, dedicated servers and management

A VPS or dedicated server gives you root access and, with it, responsibility for what you run. The shared-platform limits in clauses 6 and 8 do not apply, but clauses 3 and 4 on prohibited content and activity apply in full.

Additional IP addresses and additional RAM are charged monthly and are non-refundable. Where a renewal payment is not received we may remove the added resource or suspend the server until it is paid.

12.1 Backups on a VPS or dedicated server

Backups are not included by default. Whether they can be provided, and how, depends on the type of server you take, so they are agreed with you when the server is specified rather than assumed. Where no backup service has been agreed you remain responsible for your own copies, we strongly recommend a remote backup facility, and we cannot be held liable for data loss.

12.2 Unmanaged

You manage the server yourself. Root access is yours from the start, and no assistance with software or server management is included.

12.3 Managed

We help you manage the server: initial setup and configuration, operating system and control panel patching, security hardening and monitoring, and help when something goes wrong. You keep root access and can still run the server as you wish. Work that falls outside running the server, such as developing or debugging your own application, is quoted separately before we start it.

13. Third-party software

We provide third-party software such as cPanel and Softaculous to make your account easier to manage. It is supplied on an as-is and as-available basis. We do not guarantee any particular result from it and we are not responsible for faults in it.

You may install third-party software where it is compatible with our platform. You do so at your own risk, and we are not liable for damage, data loss or loss of use arising from it.

You are responsible for any licence or other fees required by the providers of software you install, beyond the initial account setup, unless we have agreed otherwise in writing.

14. Website migrations

Where we migrate a site to us as part of onboarding, we do so on a reasonable endeavours basis and rely on the access details and information you give us. You must have the right to move the content and to authorise us to access the source account.

A migration is not a backup. Keep your own copy of the site and its databases, and keep the source account active, until you have confirmed the migrated site is working.

We will tell you before a migration if we can see that something will not carry across, but we cannot guarantee that software, configuration or data from another provider's platform will behave identically on ours.

15. Copyright and takedown requests

If you believe material hosted by us infringes your copyright or other intellectual property rights, send a notice to [email protected], or use the form on our report abuse page, including:

1. your name, address and contact details;
2. identification of the work you say has been infringed;
3. the full URL of the material you are complaining about;
4. a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the rights holder or by law;
5. a statement that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the rights holder or are authorised to act for them.

We will review the notice and, where appropriate, pass it to the customer and give them a chance to respond or to remove the material. Where a complaint is clear-cut, or where the law requires us to act expeditiously, we may remove or disable access to the material first.

We are a hosting provider, not a court. Where a complaint is genuinely disputed we may leave the material in place, or take it down, according to our reasonable assessment of the legal risk, and tell both parties to resolve the underlying dispute between themselves.

Knowingly making a false takedown claim may make you liable for damages, including our costs.

16. Reporting abuse

If you see something hosted with us that breaches this Policy, report it to [email protected] or through our report abuse page. Please include the URL or IP address, what you believe the problem is, and any headers or logs that help us find it.

We investigate every report, and we act on it within 24 hours of receiving it. We will email you to confirm that your report has been dealt with. Phishing, malware and child sexual abuse material are treated as emergencies and actioned as quickly as we can rather than at the 24 hour mark. We usually will not be able to tell you what action we took, because that is a matter between us and our customer.

Reports of child sexual abuse material are passed to the Internet Watch Foundation and to law enforcement.

17. Resellers, agencies and your customers

If you hold a reseller or agency account, you are our customer and your clients are yours. You are responsible for their compliance with this Policy as though their activity were your own, including their content, their sending and their resource use.

You must impose terms on your clients that are at least as strict as this Policy, deal with abuse reports about their sites promptly, and give us a working abuse contact.

Where a client of yours breaches this Policy we will normally come to you first and give you the chance to deal with it. Where the breach is serious, or where you do not act, we may suspend the individual site or the whole reseller account, and we may deal with the end client directly.

Repeated abuse originating from a reseller account is a breach by the reseller, whoever created the content.

18. Investigation, suspension and termination

We decide, acting reasonably, whether this Policy has been breached and how serious the breach is.

Where we can, we will tell you what the problem is and give you a fair chance to put it right before we act. For serious, illegal or ongoing breaches, and where content or activity is actively harming other customers, our network or the public, we may suspend, isolate or remove content or the whole account immediately and without notice.

We may investigate a suspected breach, and in doing so may examine files, logs and traffic on your account. We may preserve evidence where we are required to, or where we reasonably expect legal proceedings.

We may terminate an account that has been suspended for more than seven calendar days without the underlying breach being resolved. On termination, backups of the account may be permanently deleted and no refund is due for the remainder of the term.

Where we remove content as prohibited, we may not keep a copy of it.

18.1 If you think we got it wrong

Tell us. Reply to the suspension notice or contact support and ask for the decision to be reviewed, and a manager who was not involved in the original decision will look at it. If you are still not satisfied, our complaints procedure sets out what happens next. We would far rather fix a mistake than defend one.

We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone at our discretion.

19. Law enforcement and legal requests

We will comply with valid legal requests from UK law enforcement, courts and regulators, including requests for customer and traffic data, and we may be prohibited by law from telling you that a request has been made.

Where we are not prohibited from doing so, and where it would not prejudice an investigation, we will tell you about a request affecting your account so that you can take your own advice.

We may report activity on our network to the authorities where we believe a criminal offence has been committed.

20. Availability and liability

We work hard to keep your services online, and our commitments on uptime and the remedies for missing them are set out in our Terms and Conditions. You accept that the network may be unavailable at times because of utility failure, hardware failure, natural events, acts of God or human error.

The Services are provided as is. To the fullest extent permitted by law we exclude implied warranties, including of satisfactory quality and fitness for a particular purpose, and we do not warrant that the Services will be uninterrupted or error free.

We are not liable for indirect, special or consequential loss, or loss of profits, arising from this Policy or from the Services. Subject to the next paragraph, our total liability in any month is limited to the amount you actually paid us for the affected service in that month, and is first subject to the service credit remedy for downtime set out in our Terms and Conditions.

Nothing in this Policy excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

This clause survives termination of your agreement with us.

21. Changes to this policy

We may update this Policy to reflect changes in the law, in the platform, or in the abuse we see. The version published on this page is the one that applies.

For changes that materially reduce what you are allowed to do, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email or through your account, and if you do not accept the change you may cancel before it takes effect. Changes needed urgently for legal or security reasons take effect immediately.

22. General

You confirm that you are 18 or over and legally able to enter into this agreement.

If any part of this Policy is found to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

If we do not enforce a term straight away, that does not mean we have given up the right to enforce it later.

This Policy is governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it.