Acceptable Use Policy

Game servers and things directly supporting them: your Minecraft server, its proxy, its database, its plugins and mods, and the files that belong to them.

Using a plan as general-purpose compute, as bulk file storage unrelated to your server, or as a proxy or VPN for unrelated traffic is outside what the service is sold for, even where it is not otherwise prohibited below.

You must not use the service to store, host, distribute or link to:

• Anything unlawful under the laws that apply to us or to you.
• Child sexual abuse material. This is reported to the relevant authorities, without warning and without exception.
• Content that incites violence, or that harasses or targets a person or group.
• Material that infringes someone else's copyright, trademark or other rights, including pirated software, cracked game clients and unlicensed modpack redistribution.
• Malware, ransomware, exploit kits, or tools whose primary purpose is compromising other systems.
• Phishing pages, fake login portals, or anything designed to deceive people into handing over credentials or payment details.

You must not use the service, or allow it to be used, to:

• Launch denial of service or distributed denial of service attacks, or participate in a botnet, whether as source, amplifier or controller.
• Send spam, bulk unsolicited messaging, or operate mailing infrastructure for it.
• Scan, probe, brute-force or otherwise attempt unauthorised access to any system, ours or anyone else's.
• Mine cryptocurrency, or run any other workload whose purpose is to consume CPU for value rather than to run a game server.
• Interfere with other customers: escaping your allocation, exhausting shared CPU, memory, disk or network capacity, or degrading the node for people who share it with you.
• Attempt to access another customer's server, files or data, or the host systems underneath the platform.
• Circumvent billing, resource limits or suspension.

You are responsible for what happens on your server. That includes content your players upload, what your staff do with their permissions, and how you respond when something goes wrong.

We are not going to moderate your community for you, and we have no interest in policing ordinary disputes between players. What we will do is act on reports of illegal material or of attacks originating from your server.

If we receive an abuse report about your server, we will normally forward it to you and give you the opportunity to deal with it.

Keep your server software, plugins and mods reasonably current, and be careful about what you install. A large share of compromised game servers are running a plugin from an untrusted source or a build that has been unpatched for a year.

Protect your panel and SFTP credentials, and think about who you hand subuser access to. Access you grant is access you are responsible for.

Our preference is always to contact you first, explain the problem and give you a reasonable chance to fix it. Most issues are a misconfigured plugin rather than bad intent, and they get resolved in a Discord message.

Some things do not allow for that. An active attack leaving our network, or a credible report of illegal content, will be stopped immediately and explained to you afterwards.

Actions available to us, roughly in order of severity:

• A message asking you to fix something, with a deadline.
• Rate limiting or restricting a specific behaviour.
• Suspending the server, which stops it while leaving your data in place.
• Terminating the service and closing the account, for serious or repeated breaches.
• Reporting to law enforcement, where the law requires it or the content demands it.

Contact support. Email shardhosting1@gmail.com or open it in the Discord, and say which server it was and what you think happened.

A human will look at it again. If we made a mistake we will reverse the action and say so, and where a suspension turns out to have been our error we will not charge you for the time your server was down.

We will always tell you the reason for a suspension, unless doing so would compromise a law enforcement matter. A rule that cannot be explained is not one worth enforcing.

If a Shard Hosting server is being used for something on this page, tell us at shardhosting1@gmail.com. Include the server address and enough detail to identify what is happening, and we will investigate.