Acceptable use policy

The principle

You may use our services for anything lawful that does not degrade the platform for others or expose us to liability. Everything below follows from that. We would rather have one conversation with you than suspend an account, and we will contact you first wherever circumstances allow.

Prohibited content and activity

• Anything unlawful under United States federal law or the law of the State of Missouri
• Child sexual abuse material — reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and law enforcement immediately, with no notice and no appeal
• Phishing, credential harvesting, fraudulent storefronts, or impersonation of any person or organisation
• Distribution, hosting, or command-and-control of malware, ransomware, spyware, botnets, or exploit kits
• Unsolicited bulk email, list rental, purchased mailing lists, or mail sent without demonstrable consent
• Infringement of copyright, trademark, patent, or trade secret rights
• Content that harasses, threatens, or incites violence against an individual or group
• Port scanning, penetration testing, denial-of-service traffic, or unauthorised access attempts against any system
• Cryptocurrency mining, distributed computing clients, or persistent background processes unrelated to serving a website
• Using a shared hosting account primarily as file storage, backup target, media streaming source, or public file mirror
• Open proxies, anonymising relays, public VPN endpoints, or IRC servers and bots
• Deliberately circumventing resource limits, account isolation, or billing controls

Resource use on shared plans

Shared plans are sized for normal website workloads. Sustained heavy CPU, memory, database, or process use that materially degrades neighbouring accounts needs to move to a larger plan or a container of its own. We monitor for it, and our first step is always an email explaining what we are seeing and what would fix it.

Email conduct

Send only to recipients who asked to hear from you. Honour unsubscribes promptly, keep bounce rates low, and configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — we will help. Outbound rate limits apply per account; if you need higher volume, use a dedicated transactional email provider and we will help you connect it. Repeated blocklisting caused by your sending harms every customer on the same IP and will result in suspension of outbound mail.

Security expectations for your applications

Keep your CMS, plugins, themes, and libraries patched. Use strong, unique credentials. Remove software you no longer use. Most compromises we see on shared hosting come from an abandoned plugin, not from the platform. If your site is compromised we will help you clean it and close the entry point; if it is repeatedly compromised through neglect we may require a managed arrangement or ask you to leave.

Reporting abuse

Report suspected abuse of our network to abuse@greatcloudhosting.com with the URL or IP address, timestamps, and any headers or logs. We acknowledge reports within one business day and act faster where there is an active threat. Copyright complaints under the DMCA should go to dmca@greatcloudhosting.com and include all elements required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3).

How we enforce this

Our normal sequence is: email you about what we are seeing, agree a fix and a timeframe, then escalate only if nothing changes. Escalation means suspending the offending site or process, then the account. We reserve the right to suspend immediately and without notice where there is an active security threat, an ongoing attack, a legal requirement, or illegal content. Accounts terminated for violations are not eligible for refunds.

Contact

Questions about this document: legal@greatcloudhosting.com, or write to Great Cloud Hosting, a Great Cloud Holdings company, St. Louis, Missouri, United States.