Acceptable use policy

We may refuse service if content on your account is illegal, unethical or misleading. That applies to content from you and from anyone you let use your account.

We may also refuse service for content that contains child sexual abuse material, bestiality, the promotion of illegal drugs, or hate groups or hate literature.

• You may not use our services to infringe a copyright or a trademark. That includes copying music, books, photographs or any other copyrighted work without permission.
• Offering counterfeit goods for sale ends your account immediately.
• When we find an account that infringes someone’s copyright, we promptly remove the material or disable access to it.
• We suspend or terminate accounts that infringe copyright repeatedly.
• If you believe a site we host infringes your copyright or trademark, tell us through our contact form.

These are examples of material that is not allowed on any hosting plan:

• Email marketing
• Topsites
• IRC scripts and bots
• Proxy scripts and anonymizers
• Pirated software (warez)
• Image hosting scripts, such as public photo-sharing sites
• Autosurf, paid-to-click, paid-to-surf and pay-per-click sites
• IP scanners
• Brute-force programs, scripts and applications
• Mail bombers and spam scripts
• Large collections of MP3 files, or of CD and DVD ISO images
• Banner-ad services (commercial banner-ad rotation)
• File dump and mirror scripts, such as file-sharing lockers
• Commercial audio streaming (more than one or two streams)
• Escrow services
• High-yield interest programs (HYIP) and related sites
• Investment sites: FOREX, e-gold exchanges, Second Life or Linden exchanges, Ponzi schemes, and MLM or pyramid schemes
• Sale of any controlled substance without proof, in advance, of the permits it needs
• Prime bank programs
• Lottery sites
• MUDs, RPGs and PBBGs (online role-playing and browser-based games)
• Hateful, racist or harassing sites
• Hacking sites, archives and programs
• Sites that promote illegal activity
• Forums and websites that distribute pirated or illegal content
• Bank debentures and bank debenture trading programs
• Fraudulent sites, including sites listed at aa419.org and escrow-fraud.com
• Mailer Pro
• Push-button mail scripts
• Broadcasting or streaming live sporting events
• Anonymous or bulk SMS gateways
• Bitcoin mining
• Payday loan sites

Hosting any of this breaches our terms. We may end your service without notice, and without refunding any unused amount you paid in advance.

• You may not use a shared hosting or VPS account as a backup or storage device. You may keep one backup of that same account.
• Do not keep backups of your backups.
• Do not back up your own computer to our servers.
• Everything you store on the server must be publicly reachable through your website.

On a shared hosting plan, you may not:

• use more than 20% of the server’s resources for more than 90 seconds. CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP and MySQL can all cause this;
• leave standalone server programs (daemons) running, such as an IRC server;
• run scripts that index websites (web spiders);
• run any BitTorrent application, tracker or client. You may link to torrents hosted elsewhere, but you may not host or store them;
• run any file-sharing or peer-to-peer activity;
• run game servers, such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life or Battlefield 1942;
• run cron jobs more often than every 15 minutes.

Every file in your account uses one inode: each web page, image and email. Accounts with more than 50,000 inodes are removed from our backup system automatically, to prevent overuse.

Using more than 250,000 inodes on a shared account may first lead to a warning. If you take no action, we will suspend the account.

• You may not use our network to send unsolicited commercial email (spam). You may not let anyone else use it to send spam either.
• We do not host sites or information advertised by spam sent from other networks.
• You may not spam newsgroups. You may not send spam from other networks either, whether or not it points to a site on our network.
• Sending spam breaches our terms. We will make every reasonable attempt to reach you, so you can fix the problem or answer the complaint before we act.
• If we cannot reach you, or you cannot stop the spam, we may put a temporary block in place.
• This policy is your fair warning that we have a strict no-spam policy. If you break it, we may end your services without refunding any unused amount you paid in advance.
• We will also fine you $500 for each spam incident.
• A notice we send by email counts as received one business day after we send it.

You may not use our services, or let anyone else use them, to guess passwords or to reach other systems or networks without permission.

We cooperate fully with law enforcement to detect and prosecute illegal activity.

• We expect you to know and follow good Internet etiquette.
• Follow the rules of any network we give you access to.
• Do not post, send or put online any information you want to keep confidential.
• You may not post material that is illegal, libelous or tortious, or that is likely to provoke retaliation against us by offended users.
• We may refuse or end service at any time.
• You agree to indemnify us and hold us harmless for any damage your actions cause to our business, service, equipment, network or reputation. That includes government action, vandalism and other retaliation. It also includes claims of libel, unfair competition, invasion of privacy or other wrongs. It also covers claims that you infringed a patent, copyright, trademark, service mark or other intellectual property right.

To report spam or other abuse coming from a Hosting Metro service, use our contact form.