Acceptable Use Policy

AOIT Networks Ltd, trading as AOIT Cloud Hosting. Version 1.0, last updated 26 August 2026.

This Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) forms part of our Terms and Conditions and applies to everyone who uses our services, including your own users and customers where you provide services to others using your account. Words defined in the Terms and Conditions have the same meaning here, and references in this policy to “the services” mean the Services as defined there.

We host a huge variety of legitimate websites and applications and we do not, as a matter of course, monitor our customers’ content or communications. But we run a shared platform, and one customer’s abuse can harm every other customer, our suppliers and the public. This policy sets out what is not allowed and what happens when it occurs. We may update this policy from time to time; changes are made in accordance with clause 22 of the Terms and Conditions, and the current version is always published on our legal page.

1. Lawful use only

1.1. The services may be used for lawful purposes only. You must not use them to transmit, store, publish or link to any material that breaks the law of the United Kingdom or of any jurisdiction where the material is targeted, including material that infringes copyright or other intellectual property rights, material protected by trade secret, and material that is unlawfully obscene or threatening.

1.2. You are legally responsible for the content you create and publish, in the same way as any author, including for copyright infringement and defamation.

1.3. If an account is found to contain illegal content or to be engaged in illegal activity, including pirated software, hacking tools or “warez”, the account will be suspended immediately. Failure to remove the offending content will result in termination without refund, and we will report illegal activity to the relevant authorities. Where the law requires it, including in relation to child sexual abuse material, we will notify law enforcement immediately.

2. Content standards

2.1. Content hosted on or transmitted through our platform must not:

be defamatory, or deliberately deceptive in a way likely to cause harm;
be unlawfully obscene, hateful or inflammatory, promote violence, or promote discrimination based on any protected characteristic;
infringe any copyright, database right, trade mark or other proprietary right;
be threatening, or invade another person’s privacy, including publishing or threatening to publish private data about others;
impersonate any person or organisation, or misrepresent an affiliation, including any suggestion that content originates from us;
promote, facilitate or assist any unlawful act.

3. Prohibited activities

The following are prohibited on all services:

3.1. Spam. Sending unsolicited bulk or commercial email, operating an open SMTP relay, or hosting websites advertised by spam (whether or not the spam is sent through our network). We operate a zero-tolerance spam policy: accounts sending spam will be suspended and may be terminated, and where an IP address is blacklisted because of your activity we may charge you our reasonable costs of clean-up and blacklist removal.

3.2. Attacks and unauthorised access. Accessing or attempting to access computers, accounts or networks without authorisation; penetrating or attempting to penetrate security measures; and any precursor activity such as port scanning, stealth scanning or other information gathering directed at systems you are not authorised to test.

3.3. Malware and destructive activity. Creating, distributing, hosting or transmitting viruses, worms, trojans or other malicious code; mail bombing; flooding; denial of service attacks; and inviting or knowingly provoking attacks against our platform, including participating in external attacks that result in retaliation against us.

3.4. Phishing and fraud. Hosting or linking to phishing content, fake login or banking pages, sites impersonating public institutions or private companies, credential harvesting, fraudulent card processing, pyramid schemes, or any other content designed to defraud.

3.5. Header forgery. Forging or misrepresenting message headers, in whole or in part, to disguise the originator of a message.

3.6. Facilitation. Advertising, transmitting or making available anything designed to facilitate a breach of this policy, including spamware, flooding or DoS tools, and software piracy.

3.7. Activities harmful to us or our customers. Any activity that we reasonably determine presents a genuine risk of material harm to our customers, the security or stability of our operations, or our ability to obtain the services we need to run the platform. We will explain our reasoning if we rely on this clause, and for lawful content we will act under the warning process in clause 7.2 rather than suspending first.

4. Resource use on shared hosting platforms

This section applies to shared hosting platforms (including Web Hosting, Windows Hosting and WordPress Hosting). VPS and managed cloud server products have their own dedicated resources and are limited by the resources of the plan you buy.

4.1. “Unlimited” disk space and bandwidth mean we do not meter genuine web hosting use. Shared hosting is for hosting websites, and the platform rules below protect it for everyone:

4.2. Processing capacity. A single shared hosting account must not consume more than 10% of the platform’s processing capacity. If your usage regularly exceeds what shared hosting is designed for, we will contact you to discuss a more suitable product; in serious cases we may throttle or suspend the account to protect other customers.

4.3. Databases. Individual MySQL databases are limited to 1GB each on the standard shared platform (5GB with the Website Turbo add-on, where available).

4.4. Mailboxes. Mailboxes unused for 100 days may be automatically deleted by the platform. Shared hosting must not be used as an email archival system; you may be asked to archive old mail off the platform.

4.5. File storage and backups. Shared hosting may not be used as a general file store, backup target or archive. This includes mirror sites, game file distribution, and bulk personal media (movies, music, photo dumps) not forming part of a website. A reasonable number of your own site backups may be stored, but we may ask you to remove backup archives that are affecting the platform. Self-hosted cloud storage applications (for example ownCloud, Nextcloud or Pydio) are not permitted on shared hosting.

4.6. Streaming and file distribution. Shared hosting is not designed for hosting the source files of audio or video streaming services, or for large-scale file distribution. Embedding video hosted with a specialist provider (for example, an online video platform) is fine.

4.7. Background processes and bots. Unattended server-side processes, daemons, IRC software and bots are not permitted on shared hosting. Scheduled tasks must be configured through the control panel’s scheduled task tools. We may consider specific requests case by case.

4.8. Other prohibited uses of shared hosting: proxy or anonymiser services; peer-to-peer file sharing, BitTorrent or Tor nodes; gaming servers; web spiders or indexers; providing free web hosting to the public; remote file or image hosting services (sites whose primary purpose is serving files or images for other sites); auto-surf, pay-per-click or pay-to-click traffic schemes; brute-force tools; IP spoofers or port scanners; “top sites” scripts; and scripts we reasonably determine to endanger the platform. We may disable any script that affects normal platform operation, with or without prior warning.

4.9. Gambling and regulated content. Sites providing real-money gambling require the appropriate licences; we may ask for evidence of licensing and may decline to host gambling content at our discretion. Content promoting illegal drugs or other contraband is prohibited outright.

5. Reselling and providing services to others

5.1. If you provide services to your own customers using your account, you remain responsible to us for their compliance with this policy. We do not require you to monitor your customers, but we may take action against content or activity belonging to your customer, and in serious cases against your account, even where that affects your other customers. We will target action at the offending content or customer where reasonably practicable. You agree to cooperate with any corrective action we reasonably require; failure to cooperate is itself a breach of this policy.

5.2. You must comply with all laws relating to the privacy of your users’ communications.

6. Monitoring, disclosure and privacy

6.1. We do not read our customers’ private communications, and we will not intentionally monitor private email, unless required or permitted to do so by law or by a competent authority. We do monitor the health and performance of our platform, which may involve automated processing of traffic and content metadata.

6.2. We may inspect content where we have a genuine reason to believe this policy is being breached, including content submitted for migration onto our platform.

6.3. We may disclose customer information or content where required by a court order, warrant, statute or other legal obligation, subject always to UK data protection law, and we may be prohibited from telling you we have done so. We may also disclose information where reasonably necessary to protect us, our customers or others from harm. We never sell customer information. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data.

7. Enforcement

7.1. Whether something breaches this policy is determined by us, acting reasonably. When we become aware of a breach we may do any of the following, in any order, as proportionate to the breach: issue a warning; require content to be removed; remove content ourselves; suspend or restrict the service; terminate the service; recover from you our reasonable costs directly caused by the breach, including reasonable administrative and legal costs (if you are a business customer, legal costs on an indemnity basis); and report the matter to law enforcement or other authorities.

7.2. For most breaches we will warn you and give you the opportunity to fix the problem before we act. For serious breaches, including illegal content, phishing, malware and spam, we may suspend first and notify you afterwards.

7.3. Accounts terminated for breach of this policy are not eligible for a refund under the 30-day money-back guarantee. This does not affect any refund a consumer is entitled to by law, including under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 or the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

7.4. If you are a business customer, you will indemnify us against losses, claims and reasonable costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising from a breach of this policy by you or by anyone using the Services through your account. If you are a consumer, this indemnity does not apply; instead you are responsible under the general law for losses you cause us by breaking this policy, to the extent they were a reasonably foreseeable result of the breach.

8. Reporting abuse

8.1. To report a suspected breach of this policy by any site or service hosted with us, email abuse@aoitnetworks.com. All reports are investigated promptly.