Acceptable use policy

1. About this policy

1. 1.1

   This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") forms part of the Terms of Service. It applies to everyone who uses NewHost: account holders, their team members, and anyone whose website, application, mailbox, database or server runs on or is managed through our platform.

2. 1.2

   You are responsible for what happens on your services, including content uploaded or sent by your own customers, users and developers, and for code you deploy from your Git repositories. Breaking this policy is a material breach of the Terms of Service.

3. 1.3

   If you have a reseller plan, you must make sure your clients follow this policy, and their breaches count as yours (Terms of Service, section 33, "Reseller hosting"). We may act against a single client site or account without suspending your whole account.

4. 1.4

   Words defined in the Terms of Service have the same meaning here. In this policy:

"Abuse"

any use of the services that breaks this policy.

"Platform"

the servers, networks, mail systems, dashboard, API and other systems we use to provide the services, including servers you connect to your account.

"Unlawful content"

content or activity that is illegal under South African law or the law of the place where it is directed or accessed.

2. Unlawful and harmful content

You may not host, store, transmit, link to or make available:

1. 2.1

   Child sexual abuse material of any kind, including drawn or computer-generated material and content that sexualises children. We remove it immediately without notice, terminate the account, preserve the evidence and report it to the South African Police Service and the Film and Publication Board, as the Films and Publications Act, 1996 requires of internet service providers. We do not negotiate about this.

2. 2.2

   Content that is unlawful in South Africa, including content that incites imminent violence, advocates hatred or constitutes hate speech (Constitution s16(2); Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act, 2000), harmful content prohibited by the Cybercrimes Act, 2020 (such as unlawful disclosure of intimate images or messages inciting damage to property or violence), and content that is defamatory as found by a court or that we reasonably believe is clearly defamatory.

3. 2.3

   Material that infringes copyright, trade marks or other intellectual property, including pirated software, films, music and books, cracked licences, and counterfeit goods.

4. 2.4

   Fraudulent content: phishing pages, fake shops, investment, "get rich" or pyramid schemes, advance-fee fraud, pages that impersonate a bank, government body, brand or person to obtain credentials, card details or payments, and fake invoices or documents.

5. 2.5

   Content that offers or facilitates trade in illegal goods or services, such as illegal drugs, unlicensed firearms, stolen data or credentials, or unlicensed gambling in South Africa.

6. 2.6

   Terrorist content, or content that recruits for, funds or promotes terrorism or violent extremism.

7. 2.7

   Personal information processed in breach of the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA), such as leaked databases, doxxing or collecting personal information without a lawful basis. For personal information in your content you are the responsible party.

3. Malware, attacks and security abuse

You may not use the services or the platform to:

1. 3.1

   host, distribute or control malware, ransomware, viruses, spyware, botnets or command-and-control servers, or exploit kits;

2. 3.2

   gain or attempt unauthorised access to any system, account or data, including ours and other customers' (the Cybercrimes Act, 2020 makes this a criminal offence);

3. 3.3

   scan ports, probe for vulnerabilities, brute-force passwords or run penetration tests against systems you do not own or have written permission to test. Testing the NewHost platform itself needs our prior written permission: ask use our contact form;

4. 3.4

   launch or take part in denial-of-service attacks, or flood any network, server or mailbox;

5. 3.5

   run open mail relays, open proxies, anonymising proxies or VPN exit services for third parties, or Tor exit nodes, or forge packet, e-mail or DNS headers;

6. 3.6

   get around authentication, rate limits, plan limits, billing or other security controls, or interfere with monitoring on the platform;

7. 3.7

   use another customer's account, API keys or resources without their permission.

4. E-mail, SMS and direct marketing

1. 4.1

   You may not send unsolicited bulk or commercial e-mail or SMS ("spam") from or through the services, or advertise a website hosted with us in spam sent from elsewhere.

2. 4.2

   Direct marketing by electronic communication must follow POPIA section 69: send it only to people who have consented, or to your own customers about your own similar products or services, where they were given the chance to object when their details were collected. Each message must identify you and contain a working opt-out, and you must honour opt-outs promptly. The Consumer Protection Act, 2008 (s11) also lets people refuse direct marketing.

3. 4.3

   You may not use purchased, rented, scraped or harvested address lists, send mail with false or misleading sender details or subject lines, or use mailing practices that cause our servers or IP addresses to be blocklisted.

4. 4.4

   We may set sending limits on our mail servers to protect their reputation. If your mail causes complaints, bounces or blocklisting, or a mailbox appears to be compromised, we may limit or pause outgoing mail, reset the mailbox password or lock its sign-in while you fix the cause, and we tell you when we do.

5. Fair use of resources

1. 5.1

   Each plan includes the storage, memory, processes, databases and other resources described for it. You may not use the services in a way that degrades the platform for other customers, for example by running processes that consume excessive CPU, memory or disk input/output on shared servers.

2. 5.2

   Without our written permission you may not mine cryptocurrency, run blockchain nodes, run distributed computing or password-cracking workloads, or use shared hosting as file storage, backup storage or a content-distribution network for files that are not part of your website or application.

3. 5.3

   On servers you own and connect to NewHost, resource use is between you and your server or cloud provider, but the rest of this policy still applies to everything we manage or deploy for you there.

4. 5.4

   You may not resell or sublicense the services unless your plan or a written agreement with us allows it.

6. AI gateway

1. 6.1

   Requests sent through the AI gateway must also follow the usage policy of the AI provider whose model you choose. You may not use it to generate content this policy prohibits, to build malware or attacks, or to get around a provider's safety measures.

2. 6.2

   You may not share or resell AI gateway access or credits, or use automated means to exceed your limits.

7. How we enforce this policy

We respond in proportion to the harm and the risk. Depending on the case we may:

1. 7.1

   Warn you by e-mail and give you a reasonable time to fix the problem (for example removing a compromised file or a misconfigured mail script). Most first-time, unintentional problems such as a hacked website are handled this way.

2. 7.2

   Suspend or disable the affected website, application, mailbox, outgoing mail, API key or AI gateway access, in whole or in part, until the problem is fixed.

3. 7.3

   Take content down immediately and without prior notice where it is unlawful, where we have actual knowledge of unlawful activity, or where it causes or threatens serious harm, for example child sexual abuse material, phishing, malware, active attacks, or content that puts the platform, other customers or the public at risk. We tell you what we did and why as soon as it is safe to do so.

4. 7.4

   Terminate the affected service or your whole account for serious or repeated breaches, as set out in the Terms of Service.

5. 7.5

   Preserve and disclose information, including content, logs and account details, to the South African Police Service, the Film and Publication Board, the Information Regulator, a court or another authority where the law requires or allows it (for example under a subpoena, warrant or a direction under the Cybercrimes Act or the Films and Publications Act). We do not hand over information voluntarily except where the law requires or permits it, or to protect someone from imminent harm.

6. 7.6

   Act on take-down notices under section 77 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, 2002, following our take-down notice procedure.

7. 7.7

   We are not obliged to monitor your content, and we do not routinely look at it. We act when we become aware of a problem, through a complaint, a take-down notice, an authority, or automated security and abuse monitoring.

8. 7.8

   Fees for a service suspended or terminated because you broke this policy are not refunded for the period it could not be used, except where the Consumer Protection Act or another law entitles you to a refund. You remain liable for costs we incur because of the breach, such as the cost of removing our IP addresses from blocklists.

8. Repeat infringers

1. 8.1

   We terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of customers who repeatedly infringe intellectual property or repeatedly receive valid take-down notices. In general, an account that receives three valid notices within 12 months that were not successfully disputed is treated as a repeat infringer.

2. 8.2

   We may also refuse to open a new account for a person or business whose account we closed for a breach of this policy.

9. Reporting abuse

1. 9.1

   Report abuse (spam, phishing, malware, attacks or unlawful content) on a site or address hosted with us to use our contact form. Include the URL, IP address or e-mail headers involved, what you saw and when, and how we can contact you.

2. 9.2

   To have content removed because it infringes your rights or is unlawful, send a take-down notice as described in our take-down notice procedure.

3. 9.3

   If you know of child sexual abuse material anywhere online, you can also report it directly to the Film and Publication Board (fpb.org.za) or the South African Police Service.

10. Changes to this policy

1. 10.1

   We may update this policy to deal with new kinds of abuse or changes in the law, in the way the Terms of Service describe for changes. The version and dates at the top show the current version.