1. Scope
This Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) applies to all customers and to anyone using a Hostander service, whether the customer is a company, an individual or a reseller's end client. It forms part of our Terms of Service.
2. Prohibited activities
You may not use Hostander services to host, transmit, distribute or facilitate:
- Content that is illegal under EU law or the law of the country it targets.
- Child sexual abuse material (CSAM), terrorism content or incitement to violence.
- Malware, ransomware, exploit kits, phishing kits or credential-harvesting pages.
- Spam (unsolicited bulk email, SMS, instant messages), snowshoe spamming, or operating mailing lists without verifiable opt-in.
- Outbound denial-of-service attacks, port scanning at scale, brute-force attacks against third parties, or any activity that triggers abuse reports from upstream networks.
- Open proxies, anonymization exit nodes, or services designed to launder third-party traffic through your port.
- Cryptocurrency mining on shared or oversubscribed infrastructure (dedicated/colocation customers may run mining only with prior written approval).
- Public file-sharing hubs, warez, or piracy distribution.
- Any content or service that violates third-party intellectual property or privacy rights.
3. Network and security
- You must keep your software patched and your credentials secure.
- Compromised servers used to attack others may be isolated immediately to protect the network.
- You must respond to abuse reports we forward to you within 24 hours, sooner for active incidents.
- Penetration testing of third-party systems from our network is prohibited without their written authorization and ours.
4. Bandwidth and resources
Bandwidth use is governed by our Fair Use Policy. CPU, memory and I/O on shared platforms must be used within the limits of your plan. Sustained use that destabilizes shared capacity may be addressed even if it is technically below a published threshold.
5. Email sending
Email originating from our IP space must comply with anti-spam law (including the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive). We require valid SPF/DKIM/DMARC for production senders, hard bounce handling, and one-click unsubscribe on bulk mail. We may rate-limit or block SMTP from any service that generates spam complaints.
6. Investigations and cooperation
We cooperate with lawful EU requests from competent authorities. We do not voluntarily hand over customer data and we do not act on extra-territorial requests (including under the US CLOUD Act) that have no basis in EU or Estonian law.
7. Enforcement
For minor or first-time issues we contact you and give you a chance to fix the problem. For active attacks, illegal content or repeated violations we may suspend or terminate the affected service immediately. Termination for AUP violation does not entitle you to a refund of fees already paid.
8. Reporting abuse
If you believe a Hostander-hosted service is violating this policy, please email abuse@hostander.com with as much detail as possible (URLs, IPs, timestamps, headers). Our abuse team is staffed by Hostander engineers and responds 24/7.