Acceptable Use Policy

This policy sets out what you may and may not do with our services. It applies to every account: shared hosting, reseller hosting and managed VPS. It also applies to anyone using your account, including your own customers if you are a reseller.

Breaching this policy is grounds for suspension or termination without refund.

1. Illegal and harmful content

You must not use our services to host, store, transmit or link to:

• Content that is illegal in the United Kingdom
• Child sexual abuse material — we report this to the authorities without notice or delay
• Content that infringes copyright, trademarks or other intellectual property rights
• Material that incites violence, terrorism or hatred against a group of people
• Content that harasses, threatens or defames a person
• Malware, viruses, ransomware, exploit kits or phishing pages
• Content that facilitates fraud, including carding sites and fake shops

2. Email and messaging

Email abuse is the fastest way to lose your account with us, because it damages the deliverability of every other customer on the same infrastructure.

You must not:

• Send unsolicited bulk email of any kind
• Send to purchased, scraped, harvested or rented lists
• Forge or falsify email headers, sender addresses or routing information
• Operate an open relay or open proxy
• Run a mailing list without verified opt-in and a working unsubscribe link
• Use our servers to relay mail from another provider's infrastructure

Sending limits apply per mailbox, per domain and per subscription. These limits are set at the server level and are shown in your plan details. Attempting to circumvent them is a breach of this policy.

If you plan to send legitimate bulk email, such as a newsletter to a list you built yourself, talk to us first. We would rather help you set it up properly than deal with the aftermath.

3. Resource use

Shared hosting and reseller hosting run on infrastructure shared with other customers. You must not:

• Run processes that consume disproportionate CPU, memory or disk I/O
• Run cryptocurrency mining of any kind
• Operate public file sharing, torrent trackers or media streaming services
• Run continuous background daemons on shared plans
• Use your hosting primarily as an offsite backup or file archive
• Run stress testing or load generation against any target, including your own site

We may throttle, suspend or ask you to upgrade if your usage affects other customers.

4. Network and security

You must not:

• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to any system, whether ours or anyone else's
• Scan, probe or test the vulnerability of networks you do not own
• Launch or participate in denial of service attacks
• Intercept traffic or data that is not intended for you
• Circumvent any limit, quota or security measure we have put in place

You must keep your software up to date. Outdated applications with known vulnerabilities are the most common way accounts are compromised. If your account is used to attack others because you failed to patch it, we may suspend it while you fix the problem.

5. Reseller obligations

If you are a reseller, you are responsible to us for the conduct of every customer under your account.

Your terms must be at least as strict as this policy. You may add your own restrictions but you cannot permit anything we prohibit.

You must act on abuse reports. If we forward a complaint about one of your customers, we expect you to investigate and respond within 24 hours. If you do not, we will act on your account instead.

You must not sell to known abusers. Repeatedly onboarding customers who then breach this policy will be treated as a breach by you.

You must provide contactable details for your customers on request. If we receive a legal demand relating to content on your account, we need to be able to identify who is responsible.

6. How we handle abuse

When we receive a report or detect a problem, our normal process is:

1. We investigate. Reports are logged and assessed.
2. We contact you. You will normally receive an email describing the problem and what needs to change, with a deadline.
3. We escalate if needed. Depending on severity, this may mean disabling a specific file or site, suspending the account, or terminating it.

For serious issues — child sexual abuse material, active phishing, ongoing attacks, or anything that puts our infrastructure at immediate risk — we act first and inform you afterwards.

Suspension for abuse does not entitle you to a refund.

7. Reporting abuse

If you believe an account on our network is breaking this policy, email abuse@vpspioneer.com with:

• The URL, IP address or domain concerned
• A description of the problem
• Any evidence you have, such as full email headers or log extracts
• Your contact details

We read every report. We do not always tell reporters what action we took, as that may involve another customer's private information.

8. Changes

We may update this policy as new forms of abuse appear. Material changes will be notified by email.