Unlawful content and activity
Nothing illegal.
You may not use our services to store, transmit or facilitate anything unlawful under the laws applicable to you or to us. This includes child sexual abuse material, content inciting violence, and material infringing intellectual property rights. We report the former to the relevant authorities without exception.
Email and messaging
No spam, and no sending for spammers.
Bulk unsolicited email is prohibited, whether sent from our servers or advertising a site hosted with us. Mailing lists must be opt-in and must honour unsubscribes. Outbound rate limits apply to protect the reputation of shared mail infrastructure.
Network abuse
No attacking other people.
Port scanning, denial-of-service participation, brute-force attempts and unauthorised access to systems you do not own are prohibited. Running an open relay, an open proxy or a command-and-control endpoint will result in immediate suspension.
Malicious content
No malware, no phishing.
Hosting or distributing malware, phishing pages, exploit kits or credential harvesters is prohibited and results in immediate suspension. If your site is compromised without your knowledge, that is a different matter — we clean it as part of your plan.
Resource use
Do not use more than your share.
On shared plans, sustained resource consumption that degrades service for other customers may be limited. We contact you first wherever the situation allows, and where the workload is legitimate we will suggest a plan that fits rather than simply throttling.
Restricted applications
Some things belong on a private server.
Public file-sharing hubs, cryptocurrency mining, high-volume proxy services and public IRC servers are not permitted on shared infrastructure. Several of these are perfectly acceptable on a VPS or dedicated server, and we will tell you which.
How we enforce this
We tell you before we act, unless we cannot.
Where circumstances allow, we contact you and give a reasonable opportunity to resolve the issue. Suspension without prior notice is reserved for active attacks, malware distribution, legal orders and situations placing other customers at immediate risk. Suspension decisions can be appealed by opening a ticket.
Reporting abuse
Tell us if you see abuse.
Reports go to abuse@hostelevate.com and are reviewed within one working day. Include the URL or IP address, a description of the issue and any supporting evidence such as headers or logs.