Acceptable Use Policy

1. Introduction

This Acceptable Use Policy (the "AUP" or "Policy") sets out the standards of use that Swift Nest Hosting, a sole trader trading under the name SwiftNest Hosting, of [CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS] ("SwiftNest", "we", "us") requires of every customer and every user of our services. We are not a registered company and have no company number.

Our business is to give businesses a fast, safe and reliable place to publish their websites. That is only possible if the content and traffic on our network is lawful, legitimate and does not endanger other customers or the wider internet. This Policy exists for that reason.

2. Scope and application

This Policy applies to:

• all hosting accounts, whether paid, promotional, trial or free;
• all domains, subdomains, aliases and DNS records we host or manage for you;
• all email accounts, mailboxes, mailing lists and transactional email we route for you;
• all control panel, FTP, SFTP, SSH and API access we provide;
• the SwiftNest VPN service;
• our website security scan and monthly audit services, and any website design or build work we carry out on your instruction;
• your website content, files, databases, scripts, plugins, themes and any application you deploy on our infrastructure.

It applies to you as the account holder, and to every third party who accesses a service in your name. You are responsible for the acts and omissions of anyone using your credentials or hosted content, whether or not you authorised them.

This Policy forms part of your contract with us. It is supplementary to, and does not replace, our Terms & Conditions. Where this Policy conflicts with the Terms & Conditions, the Terms & Conditions prevail except where this Policy states otherwise.

By creating an account or continuing to use a service you accept this Policy. If you do not accept it you must not use the services, and you should contact us for a refund under clause 8 of the Terms & Conditions.

3. General rules for all accounts

You must ensure that each account you register is genuine, is registered in your own name or in the name of an organisation you are lawfully authorised to represent, and provides accurate and current contact information. You must:

1. be at least 18 years old, or have the written consent of a parent or guardian who has accepted these terms on your behalf;
2. provide true, accurate and up-to-date registration and billing details, and tell us promptly if any of them change;
3. use only services you have paid for, or that we have expressly given you permission to use;
4. not resell, sublicense, sublet, lease or otherwise make our services available to any third party without our prior written consent;
5. not allow access to your account by anyone who is not authorised by you, and in particular not permit your login details to be published, shared on forums, or sold;
6. not attempt to gain unauthorised access to any other account, server, network or system, whether ours or anyone else's;
7. not use the services to store or distribute content you have no right to use, and not knowingly upload infringing material;
8. comply with all applicable law relating to your use of the services and your website, including but not limited to the UK Data Protection Act 2018, the UK GDPR, the Consumer Rights Act 2015, the Digital Economy Act 2017, the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 ("PECR").

4. Prohibited content and activity

The following are prohibited on our infrastructure. This list is not exhaustive; we may restrict activity that is not listed where it is unlawful, abusive, or harmful to the stability or security of our platform or to other customers.

4.1 Content that is unlawful or abusive

You must not host, publish, distribute, link to or facilitate:

• any content that is illegal under UK law, or that infringes the rights of others, including intellectual property rights;
• child sexual abuse material, or any content that exploits or endangers children. We report such material to the National Crime Agency and the Internet Watch Foundation and will cooperate fully with any lawful request;
• content that promotes, incites or expresses hatred against people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability;
• content that promotes terrorism or extremism, or that glorifies, celebrates or incites violence against people or property;
• content that promotes suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, or instructions or methods of self-harm;
• content that is defamatory, slanderous or knowingly false;
• content that infringes intellectual property rights, including photographs, images, video, audio, text, software, fonts, music and trademarks, without the necessary licence or permission;
• any content that infringes the privacy or data protection rights of individuals, including publishing personal data without a lawful basis;
• content that is obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit where such content is unlawful, or any material that could be accessed by minors and is not age-restricted or otherwise controlled;
• content advertising, promoting or facilitating the sale of regulated goods or services without the required licence or approval, including but not limited to alcohol, nicotine products, gambling, pharmaceuticals, weapons and firearms;
• content that misrepresents your identity, your qualifications, your affiliation or your products, or that impersonates another person, business or government body;
• content constituting or encouraging "spam", including unsolicited bulk commercial email, SEO spam, comment spam, link farming and hidden or cloaked content intended to manipulate search engine rankings.

4.2 Fraud, deception and financial activity

• phishing, smishing, vishing or any social-engineering scheme designed to obtain credentials, payment details or financial information;
• any fake online shop, payment page or invoice designed to deceive customers or take payment for goods or services that will not be delivered;
• counterfeit goods, or the unauthorised sale of branded products, software or digital licences;
• cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes, HYIP-style investment schemes, pyramid selling, or any unregistered financial promotion. If you operate a financial, investment or trading service, you must hold the relevant Financial Conduct Authority authorisation and must be able to evidence it on request;
• any payment, escrow or money-transmission activity that requires authorisation which you do not hold;
• using the services to launder money, or to receive payments on behalf of any third party without the necessary registration.

4.3 Security and hacking tools

• malware, including ransomware, spyware, keyloggers, rootkits, trojans, worms, botnets, backdoors, bootkits, and any hidden or unauthorised monitoring software;
• any software, script, exploit or tool intended to gain unauthorised access to, or to damage, disable or degrade, any system, network or account;
• stolen credentials, dumps of breached passwords, or session tokens;
• exploit kits, or any code that takes advantage of a vulnerability in software you do not own or have permission to test;
• web shells, proxy frameworks, or open relays.

4.4 Circumvention and unfair trading

• any attempt to circumvent, spoof or tamper with our billing, bandwidth counters, resource limits, suspension mechanisms or security monitoring;
• using automated systems, scrapers or crawlers to access our website or any other website in breach of its terms of use or robots directives, or to overload any system;
• reselling access to third-party services without authorisation;
• using our services to host or distribute material that infringes a third party's intellectual property rights.

5. System and network use

Because many customers share our infrastructure, we have to protect it from abuse. You must not, and must not permit any third party to:

1. consume resources in a disproportionate way, including sustained CPU load, excessive memory use, large numbers of concurrent processes, or repeated database queries that degrade shared services;
2. exceed the disk space, bandwidth, mailbox, database, mail-sending or other fair-use limits set out in your plan or in our published fair use terms;
3. run any form of cryptocurrency mining, or permit others to mine on your hosting;
4. operate a public proxy, open relay, Tor exit node, VPN service, SOCKS service or similar relay or anonymisation service for third parties.;
5. perform network or port scanning, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing or similar reconnaissance against any system, network or IP address other than your own, without the owner's prior written authorisation;
6. initiate, facilitate or support a distributed denial of service attack, reflection attack, amplification attack, packet flood or any other method of overwhelming a network or making it unavailable;
7. send or accept unsolicited network traffic, or use our IP space for any purpose other than hosting your own content;
8. run any process that is designed to persist after you disconnect, or that hides its identity, parent process or resource usage from the operating system or the control panel;
9. upload, install or execute software containing malicious code, or that is unlicensed, unauthenticated or of unknown provenance;
10. modify, overwrite, disable or interfere with the operating system, control panel, security monitoring, or any component of the platform we provide, except where expressly permitted;
11. attempt to gain access to, or to use, the accounts, files, or resources of other customers, or of SwiftNest itself.

6. Email, newsletters and mail servers

Emails that become spam damage the deliverability of every customer's mail, and for that reason email use is tightly controlled. You must not:

1. send unsolicited commercial email, bulk email or "spam", or consent to it being sent on your behalf. Where you email subscribers you must have obtained their consent in accordance with PECR and must identify yourself correctly and provide a working unsubscribe mechanism;
2. use purchased, scraped, rented or harvested email lists, or send to addresses that have bounced or complained;
3. s forge, falsify or obscure email headers, return paths or sender identity, or use our domain or IP addresses to send mail that does not originate from your account;
4. use our infrastructure as an open relay or open mail exchange;
5. send or relay mail that is unlawful under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, the Communications Act 2003, PECR, or equivalent legislation in any other jurisdiction;
6. use your account to circumvent anti-spam controls elsewhere, including by routing traffic through our servers;
7. store or process personal data in breach of data protection law, or use our mail service to distribute material that is itself prohibited under clause 4;
8. conduct unsolicited email marketing on behalf of another party without written authorisation from us.

We monitor outbound email reputation. Mail sent from your account that generates spam complaints or results in our IP addresses being blacklisted may be suspended immediately under clause 13.

7. Domains and DNS

When we register or host a domain for you you must not:

1. register or use a domain that infringes another's trade mark or other rights, or that is confusingly similar to a protected name. We are required to comply with the UK Intellectual Property Office dispute resolution process and will remove or suspend domains subject to a valid infringement notice;
2. register domains in breach of the registry's rules, or use a domain for phishing, malware distribution, or to impersonate another person or organisation;
3. use a domain to host content that is prohibited under clause 4;
4. fail to renew a domain before its expiry date, where you have delegated DNS to us, where the failure risks another party taking the name, or where the domain is used for unsolicited commercial email;
5. use wildcard DNS or catch-all records in a way that is inconsistent with clause 4 or which attracts a high volume of automated traffic. We may ask you to use explicit subdomain records instead;
6. point your domain at a destination that constitutes substantial infringement of copyright, or which hosts content that requires us to act under clause 10.

You acknowledge that all domains we register for you are licensed to you for your use during the term of your hosting. Domains are not transferable to another customer without our consent. ICANN and the relevant registry rules govern any dispute about domain ownership, and you agree to submit to those rules.

8. Security and account access

Shared hosting is a shared responsibility. While we secure the platform, the security of your website is principally your responsibility. You must:

1. use unique, strong passwords for the control panel, FTP, SFTP, SSH, databases, email accounts and any other credentials, and change them where you suspect or are told they may be compromised;
2. enable two-factor authentication on the control panel and any mailbox where we make it available, and keep your recovery details current;
3. restrict access to your account to named individuals who need it, and revoke access immediately when a team member or contractor leaves;
4. keep WordPress core, themes, plugins, PHP and any other software up to date, and remove plugins and themes that are unused, unsupported or abandoned;
5. not store credentials in plain text, in public repositories, in publicly accessible configuration files, or in theme files that are served to visitors;
6. protect any application you deploy, including validating input, using parameterised queries, and preventing file upload vulnerabilities;
7. report to us without undue delay, and in any event within 24 hours, any actual or suspected compromise of your account, website, or data, including unauthorised access, defacement, or the loss of control of a mailbox or domain.

9. Websites, applications and third-party software

1. You are solely responsible for the content and legality of everything you publish on your website, including text, images, video, audio, downloads, user-generated content, comments, forums, reviews and any content submitted by your own users.
2. You must obtain the necessary consents, licences and permissions for all content you publish, including permissions from the people who appear in photographs or recordings and from the owners of any music, film, fonts, stock imagery or other creative works you use.
3. Third-party software you install, including WordPress themes, plugins, themes, scripts, cron jobs, webhooks and applications, is licensed to you under its own terms. You must accept those terms and comply with them. We are not responsible for third-party software, its licensing, its security or its fitness for purpose.
4. You must not use the services in a way that breaches the licence terms of any third-party software, and must not install unlicensed, cracked, nulled or pirated software.
5. Where you allow third parties to post content — comments, forums, reviews, uploads, user accounts — you are responsible for moderating that content and for establishing appropriate terms of use, privacy notices and reporting mechanisms for it. You act as the publisher of that content for legal purposes.
6. You must not host, distribute or make available any software that is designed to damage, disable or interfere with third-party systems, or any unauthorised copy of software, media or other creative works.
7. Applications you deploy must not be used to send bulk unsolicited email, to overload the platform, or to facilitate any activity prohibited elsewhere in this Policy.

10. Intellectual property and takedown requests

If you believe that material hosted on our platform infringes your copyright, trademark or other rights, or that content on your account is unlawful, send a notice to abuse@swiftnesthosting.com that includes:

1. your full name, company name (if applicable), postal address, email address and telephone number;
2. the exact URL or full IP address of the material in question;
3. identification of the work that is claimed to be infringed;
4. a statement that you own the rights, or that you are authorised to act for the owner;
5. a good-faith statement that the use is not authorised by the rights owner, its agent, or the law;
6. a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act on the owner's behalf;
7. your physical or electronic signature.

On receiving a valid notice we will, where appropriate, remove or disable access to the material and notify the account holder. We may also suspend the relevant account or domain pending investigation where the complaint appears credible, or where the content presents a risk of continuing harm.

If you are the account holder and believe that material was removed in error, you may respond to us with an explanation and any evidence supporting your case, and we will review the decision. We may disclose to the complaining party the information reasonably necessary to allow the notice to be acted upon.

11. SwiftNest VPN — specific conditions

The SwiftNest VPN is intended for your own private use — securing your connection on public Wi-Fi, protecting your privacy and masking your IP address. Because the service is frequently used for activity that is otherwise hidden, these additional conditions apply:

1. you must not use the VPN to commit any criminal offence, or to facilitate the infringement of any right, including copyright infringement via torrent or file-sharing networks;
2. you must not use the VPN to send unsolicited bulk email, to conduct phishing, to distribute malware, to attack or to scan other systems, or to host or access prohibited content under clause 4;
3. you must not attempt to reconfigure, resell, redistribute or provide the VPN service to third parties, whether as a proxy, reseller, shared account, or embedded product;
4. you must not attempt to circumvent the no-logs configuration, the fair-use limits, or the technical restrictions of the service;
5. while we operate a strict no-logs policy for traffic data, we may temporarily retain the minimum technical information necessary to operate the network securely, prevent abuse, and comply with lawful requests, including IP address and connection timestamps, and we may record an account's use of the service where that is necessary to investigate abuse or a security incident.

Use of the VPN is additionally subject to our privacy notice. We do not monitor or log the content of your traffic, and we will not disclose browsing history to third parties, but we will comply with valid legal requests in accordance with clause 20 of the Terms & Conditions.

12. Security audit and scanning services

1. Our one-off security scan and monthly security audit services are authorised assessments. Where you commission a scan of a website, you must confirm to us in writing that you own the website or that you have the owner's permission to have it scanned. You must not commission a scan of any system you are not authorised to test, or use the report for any unlawful purpose.
2. Our scanning is non-invasive. It does not exploit vulnerabilities, gain access to data, or change your website. Our findings are indicative and are provided on a reasonable-effort basis. A clean report does not constitute a guarantee that a website is free from vulnerabilities or that a penetration attempt would fail.
3. Where we scan a website that is not hosted with us, we rely on your instructions and the permissions you confirm. We accept no liability for any claim brought by the owner of a scanned system in relation to a scan carried out on your authority.
4. You must not use the vulnerability information in a report to cause harm, and you must remediate vulnerabilities in a timely manner. We may suspend a hosting account where a known critical vulnerability is left unpatched and is actively being exploited, or where the site is being used to attack third parties.

13. Monitoring, enforcement and suspension

13.1 Proactive monitoring

We proactively monitor our infrastructure for the purposes of security, fraud prevention, service reliability and legal compliance. This may include automated scanning, abuse detection, traffic analysis, and review of accounts that generate complaints, unusual traffic patterns, or security alerts. We do not routinely read the private content of your files, mailboxes or databases, and we will not access your account without a lawful basis, your consent, or where we reasonably believe there is an imminent risk of unlawful activity, malware, or significant harm to other customers.

13.2 Our approach

We operate a proportionate, graduated approach. We prefer to work with you to fix a problem. Our normal escalation ladder is:

1. Informational notice — we contact you, explain the issue, and ask you to resolve it within a reasonable period (normally 48 to 72 hours). Nothing is changed at this stage.
2. Formal warning — where the issue is serious or persists, we issue a written warning setting out the specific rule breached, the remedial action required, and a deadline.
3. Limited suspension — we restrict or suspend the specific functionality, domain, or account concerned until the breach is resolved. Your files are preserved during the suspension period.
4. Full suspension or termination — the account is suspended without notice or terminated, and no refund is given for the remainder of the term.

13.3 Immediate action without notice

We will skip the ladder above and act immediately, with or without notice to you, where we reasonably believe that:

• the activity is unlawful, or constitutes a criminal offence, or is subject to an order of a court or competent authority;
• the content is child sexual abuse material, or a credible threat to life or safety is present;
• the account is compromised and is being used to send spam, spread malware, or attack third-party systems;
• the activity is causing a denial of service, a network attack, or material harm to other customers or to the platform; our email or IP reputation is being damaged, or our systems are being abused as part of an attack;
• we receive a valid and credible intellectual property infringement notice or an abuse complaint that requires immediate action to prevent ongoing harm;
• payment fraud, chargeback abuse, or a false refund claim is detected;
• the account presents an immediate and serious security risk to the platform.

Where practicable we will restore the affected content to you once the immediate risk is resolved, but we are not obliged to restore content that is itself unlawful, and we may be unable to restore content that has been deleted or overwritten in the course of securing the account.

13.4 Effect of suspension

While an account is suspended you may not access any service, and your website, email and any application will be unavailable. Unless the suspension is the result of your breach of these terms, the monthly or annual subscription continues to run and remains payable for the duration of the suspension. We may apply a suspension fee of up to £25 per incident, or require a one-off security audit to be completed before the account is reinstated, where the incident was avoidable and we have had to carry out remedial work.

14. Reporting abuse and complaints

If you are a third party and wish to report content hosted on our platform, or a security vulnerability in our own systems, please email abuse@swiftnesthosting.com with as much detail as you can, including the URL and the nature of the complaint. We aim to acknowledge all reports within one UK working day.

We operate a clear complaints procedure, and where our conduct falls short we will put it right. Please raise complaints with us first at support@swiftnesthosting.com or by post to [CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS]. If you remain dissatisfied, you may refer the matter to an Alternative Dispute Resolution provider, where we will take part in the process. The relevant statutory framework is the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 and the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

15. Appeals

If we have suspended, limited or terminated your account, or removed content, you may appeal. Send your appeal to abuse@swiftnesthosting.com within 30 days of the decision, setting out the account name and why you believe the decision was wrong or disproportionate. We will acknowledge the appeal within one UK working day and will have it reviewed by a person who was not involved in the original decision wherever that is reasonably possible. We will confirm our final position in writing within 10 UK working days.

Appeals do not suspend the suspension while they are being considered. Where a suspension arose from an urgent security or legal risk, the account will remain restricted during the review.

16. Changes to this policy

We review this Policy at least annually, and more often where the legal or technical landscape requires it. We may amend it at any time, including to reflect changes in law, changes in our platform, or to address new threats. The version in force is the version published on this page at the time you use the services.

Where a change materially affects your rights or the permitted use of your services, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email to the address on your account before the change takes effect. If you do not accept a material change, you may terminate the affected service before it takes effect and, provided you have not breached these terms, receive a pro-rata refund of the fees paid for the unused period.

We record the effective date of each version at the top of this document.

17. Contact us

Questions about this policy are welcome. Please contact us:

SwiftNest Hosting

Swift Nest Hosting (a sole trader, not a registered company)

Correspondence address

[CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS]

Abuse and enforcement notices

abuse@swiftnesthosting.com

General support

support@swiftnesthosting.com

Support hours

Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm UK time, excluding UK public holidays