Acceptable use policy

The short version #

Nothing illegal. Nothing that attacks or deceives anyone. Nothing that belongs to someone else. No unsolicited bulk email. Nothing that breaks the rules on what a business may claim about itself.

And when something does go wrong, our first move is an email to you, not a switch. We suspend a site without warning only where the law leaves us no choice or where someone is being harmed while we wait, and that short list is in section 8.

Who it applies to #

This policy forms part of the terms of service. It applies to you, to anyone you give access to your dashboard, to anyone you let publish on your behalf, and to everything that ends up on the website or passes through the mailbox, whoever put it there.

It applies whether we made the change or you did. If you send us something to publish and it breaks this policy, we will not publish it, and we will tell you why.

What may not be hosted #

Against the law

• Child sexual abuse material. Removed and reported immediately, with no notice and no discussion. Federal law requires an electronic service provider to report apparent child sexual abuse material to the CyberTipline run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and to preserve the material and the records around it for at least 90 days so that law enforcement can act on the report. We do both, and we preserve for longer where an agency asks us to. We do not warn the account holder first, because the law does not permit us to.
• Terrorist material, or anything encouraging or assisting a criminal offense.
• Material inciting hatred or violence against people for their race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, disability or gender identity.
• Threats, harassment or stalking, or material published to frighten or humiliate a named person.
• Anything that breaches a court order or an injunction.
• Defamatory material. We are not a court and we do not decide who is right, but we act on a properly made complaint under section 10.

Other people’s property

• Photographs, illustrations, music, video, fonts or text you do not have a license to use. A picture found on a search engine is not a licensed picture, and the invoice from an agency arrives months later. We source and license the images for your build, and product photographs you can take on a phone covers the ones only you can take.
• Copy lifted from a competitor’s website, which is both an infringement and immediately obvious to your customers.
• Someone else’s trademark, logo or brand used in a way that suggests you are them, are approved by them or are part of them.
• Counterfeit goods, or goods you are not entitled to resell.
• Confidential information, leaked documents, or personal data about someone who has not agreed to it being published.

Deception

• Phishing: any page built to collect someone’s password, card number or bank details by pretending to be a business they trust.
• Pretending to be another business, a public body or a real person.
• Fake reviews and fake testimonials, including ones you have written yourself, bought, or offered someone an incentive to leave without saying so. The Federal Trade Commission’s rule on fake and paid reviews bars exactly this, and real ones are easier to come by than people expect: how to ask a customer for a review without it being awkward.
• Invented prices, invented discounts, a “was” price that was never charged, or a countdown that resets forever.
• Claiming qualifications, memberships, accreditations, awards or insurance you do not hold.

Rules a business has to follow anyway

Your website is an advertisement, and the same rules apply to it as to anything else you publish. In the United States the general rule comes from section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which bars unfair or deceptive acts and practices, and your own state has a consumer protection statute that says much the same thing and is usually enforced by its attorney general. On top of those sit rules for particular claims and particular trades. None of this is legal advice about your business, and we are not your attorney. It is the list we apply when we decide whether something may stay on a site we host:

• Claims that mislead a customer about what they are buying, what it costs, or what happens next. That includes the total price: a fee a customer only discovers at the checkout is the thing regulators are looking hardest at right now.
• Advertising you cannot back up. The Federal Trade Commission expects a business to hold its substantiation before the claim goes up, not to go looking for it when challenged.
• Endorsements and testimonials that hide a material connection. If the person was paid, given free goods, related to you or employed by you, the page has to say so clearly and near the endorsement, which is what the Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guides require.
• A “Made in USA” claim on goods that are not all or virtually all made here.
• Your own subscription sold without the disclosures, the separate consent and the easy cancellation route that federal and state automatic-renewal law require. If you sell a recurring plan from a site we host, you have to meet the same standard we hold ourselves to on the billing page.
• Investment, securities, insurance, lending or credit-repair offers made without the license or registration that activity requires in the states you reach.
• Gambling without the license your state requires, or promoting an unlicensed operator.
• Health, medical, dietary supplement or cosmetic claims you cannot support with competent and reliable scientific evidence, prescription medicines offered to the public, claims that a product treats or cures a disease, or anything the licensing board of your profession forbids you to say.
• Selling age-restricted goods without proper age checks, and anything requiring a license or registration you do not hold in the state where the customer is.
• Collecting personal information from children under 13 without the verifiable parental consent the federal children’s privacy rule requires, on any site we host.

Adult material

We do not host pornography or other adult content on this service. That is a decision about what this product is, not a judgment about the trade: the age verification and record keeping duties that come with hosting it are not ones an $8.99 small business hosting plan is built to meet, and we would rather say so up front than take your money and get it wrong.

Technical harm

• Malware, ransomware, exploit kits, key loggers, or anything designed to damage a visitor’s device.
• Mining cryptocurrency, on our servers or in your visitors’ browsers.
• Open mail relays, open proxies, anonymizing exit nodes, file sharing trackers or stresser services.
• Using the hosting as a general file store, a backup drive or a download mirror for material unrelated to your website.

Email, and bulk sending #

Unsolicited bulk email is not allowed from our mailboxes, from your website’s forms, or from anything connected to them. That covers messages you send yourself and messages sent through you by someone else.

The federal act, CAN-SPAM, is built on an opt-out: it lets a business send a first commercial email to someone who never asked, as long as the message is not misleading, carries a postal address and offers a working way to stop. Several states add rules on top of that, and separate law again governs marketing by text message and by telephone. We do not run this service on the federal minimum. What may be sent from a DEVIQO mailbox rests on consent or a real customer relationship. That is stricter than CAN-SPAM, it is what the strictest state expects, and it is also the only way to keep a shared mail server delivering.

• Marketing email to people who never asked for it and are not your customers. Federal law may tolerate the first one; we do not carry it. A list of strangers is not a list you may mail from here.
• Lists that were bought, rented, scraped, swapped or “verified” by a third party. A list you did not build yourself is a list without consent.
• Messages that hide who sent them, forge the sender address or use a reply address that goes nowhere.
• Ignoring an unsubscribe. Every marketing message must carry one, and it must work.

What every marketing message has to carry

The rules above are about who you may write to. These are about the message itself, and they come from the federal act. Every commercial email you send from here has to:

• be accurate in the from line, the reply address and the routing, and truthful in the subject line about what is inside;
• be identifiable as an advertisement, rather than dressed as a personal note or a receipt;
• carry a valid physical postal address for your business. A street address, a registered post office box or a registered mailbox at a mail agency all count;
• give a clear way to opt out that costs nothing, needs no login, and asks for nothing beyond the email address and which messages to stop;
• keep that opt-out route working for at least 30 days after the message went out;
• be acted on within 10 business days of someone opting out, and preferably at once.

Hiring an agency to send it does not move any of this off you: the business being promoted answers for the message as much as the one that pressed send. We build the sign-up form and the footer with the address in it as part of your site, so ask us rather than pasting one together.

Texts and telephone calls

Marketing by text message or by automated telephone call is governed separately and far more strictly, by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. It needs prior express written consent from the person before the first message, obtained in a way that is not bundled with anything else, and it has to honor a stop request at once. There is also the National Do Not Call Registry, which applies to telemarketing calls. Do not send marketing texts from a number listed on a site we host to a list that did not opt in to texts specifically. The penalties are per message and they are the reason small businesses lose more money to this than to anything else on this page.

There are practical limits on the mailboxes as well, and they exist to protect the reputation of the servers everybody shares:

• up to 500 messages a day from a mailbox, and up to 100 recipients on a single message;
• a newsletter to more than that goes through a proper bulk email provider, which handles the authentication and the unsubscribes for you. Ask us and we will set one up, and see the business email page for what the mailboxes themselves do.

We watch the delivery reputation of our mail servers because everybody’s mail depends on it. A mailbox generating complaints, or one that has clearly been compromised and is sending on someone else’s behalf, gets suspended while we sort it out, and we will tell you the moment we do it.

Security and the network #

You must not use anything of ours to reach anything you are not entitled to reach, here or anywhere else. In particular: no scanning, probing or testing systems that are not yours; no denial of service; no spoofing addresses; no intercepting traffic; no trying to get at another customer’s data or to break out of your own environment.

You must not work around the limits of your plan by technical means, and you must not resell our hosting to someone else unless we have agreed it in writing.

Keep your dashboard login to yourself and use a password you have used nowhere else. Most compromised sites we see were compromised through a reused password rather than through anything clever.

Resource limits #

We do not sell “unlimited” anything, because there is no such thing and the word only ever appears next to a footnote. What each plan carries is set out on the web hosting page. Here is what is true.

Storage

Basic has plenty of room for a site of a dozen pages and a few hundred photographs. Complete has four times that, reviewed with you rather than metered by surprise. We do not publish a figure in gigabytes because we look at what a site is doing rather than at a number, and nobody has ever been cut off for being slightly over one.

Traffic

There is no monthly bandwidth cap and no charge for a busy month. A local business having its best week ever is exactly what the hosting is for. What does need a different arrangement is a site serving large video files or downloads at scale, because that is a media platform rather than a website, and we will tell you that rather than let the bill or the performance surprise you.

Processing

Your site shares a machine with other customers, and a script stuck in a loop takes the machine down for all of them. Sustained heavy processing gets throttled automatically so that everybody else stays up. If that happens more than briefly, we look at why and come to you with what we found.

Backups and mailboxes

The nightly backup is there to put your website back, not to serve as an archive of unrelated files. The mailbox is for your correspondence, not as a place to park a media library. Neither restriction has ever affected a customer using them for the thing they are for.

What we do about it

We email you first, always, and explain what we are seeing. Nothing is charged that you have not agreed to, and no site is taken down over resources unless it is actively harming other customers on the same machine, in which case we throttle it before we suspend it and write to you either way.

When something crosses the line #

1. A person looks Whether it came from a complaint, from our monitoring or from a regulator, someone on our team reads the page and forms a view. No automated filter suspends a website here.
2. We write to you To the address on your account, saying exactly which page is the problem, which part of this policy it touches, what needs to change and by when. If it is something we can fix ourselves in a minute, we will offer to.
3. You get time Normally 7 days for a content matter. 24 hours where something is actively causing harm, such as a compromised site serving malware, in which case we may also take that one page offline while the rest of the site stays up.
4. Or you tell us we have it wrong Which happens, and which is fine. Reply with your side of it and we hold everything while we look again. If you are right, that is the end of it and there is no mark on your account.
5. If nothing changes We suspend as narrowly as we can: the page rather than the site, the site rather than the mailbox. A holding page goes up, and it does not say anything about you to your visitors beyond that the site is unavailable.
6. You can appeal Reply to the suspension email. A director reviews it and answers within two business days. If the answer goes your way, the site is back within the hour.
7. Repeated breaches If the same problem keeps coming back, we may end the agreement on 30 days’ notice, and you keep the export window in the refunds policy.

The short list, where there is no notice #

Some things cannot wait seven days, because someone is being harmed while the clock runs. In these cases we act first and write to you immediately afterwards:

• Child sexual abuse material.
• A live phishing page collecting people’s passwords or bank details.
• Malware being served to visitors, or a site that has clearly been taken over.
• An attack being run from your site against someone else.
• A court order, or a valid notice from the police or a regulator that requires immediate removal.
• Something causing sustained damage to the other customers sharing the machine.

Even then, you get an email within one hour of us acting, telling you what we did and why, and the appeal in section 7 is open to you right away. A compromised website is not your fault and we do not treat it as though it were: we clean it, close the hole, put the site back from a clean backup and explain what happened, at no charge. What we commit to on restores and how quickly they start is in the service level document.

Reporting something to us #

If a site we host is doing something it should not, email [email protected]. You do not need to be a customer, and you do not need to know anything technical.

It helps enormously if you include:

• the exact web address of the page, not just the name of the site;
• what is wrong with it, in your own words;
• when you saw it, and a screenshot if you have one;
• a way to reach you, in case we need to ask something.

We acknowledge every report within one business day. Anything alleging immediate harm is looked at within four hours while the desk is staffed, and out of hours by whoever the monitoring wakes. We will tell you what we decided unless there is a good reason not to.

We do not pass your name or contact details to the site owner without asking you first, except where the law requires it. A copyright complaint is the main exception: a notice under section 10 has to identify the person making it, because the owner has to be able to answer it.

Copyright and other rights complaints #

Copyright complaints about material on a site we host are handled under section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That statute sets out what a notice has to contain, what we have to do about it, and what the person who published the material may do in reply. We follow it as written, for everybody, and we do not treat it as optional.

Our designated agent

Designated agent

Copyright Agent, Fumo Media LLC

By mail

Fumo Media LLC, 1910 Thomes Ave., Cheyenne, WY 82001-3527, United States

By email

[email protected], with “DMCA” in the subject line

Copyright Office filing

Registration in the United States Copyright Office directory of designated agents is being filed. Until it appears there, send notices to the address above and we act on them exactly as set out below.

What a takedown notice has to contain

The statute requires all six of these, and a notice missing one may not be effective:

1. a physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or someone authorized to act for them;
2. identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed, or a representative list if there are many;
3. identification of the material you say is infringing, with enough detail for us to find it, which in practice means the exact web address of every page;
4. your name, mailing address, telephone number and email address;
5. a statement that you have a good faith belief that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent or the law;
6. a statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and that under penalty of perjury you are the owner or are authorized to act on the owner’s behalf.

If your notice is missing something we will tell you which part and give you the chance to send it again, rather than filing it and saying nothing.

What we do with it

1. We act expeditiously. On a properly made notice we remove the material or disable access to it, normally the same business day.
2. We tell our customer. The same day, we send them a copy of the notice, tell them what came down and explain that they may file a counter-notice. We do not remove something and leave them to discover it.
3. We keep the record. Every notice, every counter-notice and every action taken is logged, and either side can have a copy of what concerns them.

If you are the customer and the notice is wrong

You may file a counter-notice with our designated agent. It has to contain your signature, identification of the material and where it was before it was removed, a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good faith belief it was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification, your name, address and telephone number, and your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the district where you live, or where we are if you are outside the United States, and to accept service from the person who sent the notice.

When we get a valid counter-notice we forward it to the person who complained. The statute then sets the clock: unless they tell us within 10 business days that they have filed a court action to stop you, we put the material back, and we do it between the tenth and the fourteenth business day. We do not need to be persuaded to restore it and we do not charge for doing so.

Repeat infringers

We terminate the accounts of subscribers who are repeat infringers. That is a condition of the safe harbor and we apply it evenly. What counts is a properly made notice you did not successfully answer: a claim you replied to with a counter-notice, and which was not taken to court, does not count against you. Before we end an account on this ground we write to you, tell you which notices we are counting and give you a chance to say why we have it wrong.

Complaints that are not about copyright - a trademark, a defamation claim, a photograph of someone who did not agree to it - go to the same address and are handled under section 7. They have no statutory procedure behind them, so we look at what has been sent, put it to the customer, and act where the answer does not hold up.

Police, courts and regulators #

We comply with valid legal requests, and we check that they are valid before we do. We ask for the legal power being relied on, and we do not hand over customer data to someone who simply says they are an officer. The request has to be in writing and it has to cite its authority.

Where we are allowed to tell you that a request has been made about your account, we do. Sometimes a court order forbids it, and in that case we cannot, and we will not pretend otherwise by staying silent about the possibility here.

Changes to this acceptable use policy #

We update this when the law changes or when we meet something the policy did not anticipate. The date at the top says when it last changed.

If a change would affect what you are already doing on your site, we email you at least 30 days beforehand, because it is not reasonable to move a line you are already standing behind.

Common questions about the acceptable use policy #

Three of these come from customers checking they are on the right side of the lines above. Three come from people who are not customers at all, which is fine: this page is for them too.