These Terms of Service (the "Terms") govern your access to and use of the Hostd game-server hosting platform, the website at https://hostdservers.com, the dashboard, the public APIs, and any related services (together, the "Services") operated by Hostd ("we", "us", "our"). By creating an account, purchasing a plan, or otherwise using the Services you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Services.
1. Eligibility and Account
You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account, or the age of digital consent in your jurisdiction if that is higher. You may not hold an account if you are legally incapable of entering into a binding contract.
If you are under 18, you confirm that a parent or guardian has read and agreed to these Terms and consents to any payments made on the account. They may also hold the account themselves, in which case they are the customer under these Terms and are responsible for the account and for activity on the server.
Anyone may play on a server regardless of age. These requirements are about who holds the account and pays, not about who is allowed to use it.
If you are using the Services on behalf of a company or other legal entity, you confirm that you have authority to bind that entity to these Terms, in which case "you" refers to that entity.
You are responsible for safeguarding your credentials, for all activity performed under your account, and for keeping your contact information current. We strongly recommend enabling time-based one-time-password (TOTP) two-factor authentication, which is offered free of charge for every account. You must notify us immediately at support@hostdservers.com if you suspect unauthorised access.
You may close your account at any time through the "Delete account" action in the dashboard. Doing so revokes all active sessions, immediately cancels any active Stripe subscription (no further renewals are charged), and starts the deletion process described in our Privacy Policy.
2. The Services
We provide compute, storage, and network capacity on which you may run third-party game-server software ("Game Servers"), together with: a real-time WebSocket console; a browser-based file manager; a scheduled-task runner; an automated backup and restore system; an audit log; subdomain assignment; and a customer dashboard.
CPU, memory, and disk limits on your Game Server are isolated at the operating-system level so one customer's workload cannot starve another. Network-layer DDoS mitigation is included on every plan at no additional charge.
We do not grant any licence to the underlying game software. You are responsible for complying with the end-user licence agreement, terms of service, and community standards of every game publisher whose dedicated-server software you run, and for any plugin, mod, or modpack you choose to install.
3. Plans, Billing and Taxes
3.1 Subscriptions and currency
Plans are billed in advance through Stripe. The applicable plan, price, currency, and billing cycle are shown at checkout and on the invoice; primary billing is in USD, with display conversion available in the dashboard. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each cycle until you cancel. The available billing cycles are monthly, quarterly (with a discount applied at checkout), and annual (with a larger discount applied at checkout).
3.2 Taxes
Prices are exclusive of VAT, GST, sales tax, or other similar taxes unless explicitly stated otherwise. Where we (or Stripe acting on our behalf) are required by law to collect tax, it is added at checkout based on your billing address.
3.3 Failed payments
If a renewal payment fails we may retry the charge in line with Stripe's retry schedule and will notify you by email at each retry. If the failure is not resolved we may suspend the associated Game Server. Suspension under this clause is not a basis for a service credit under section 10.
3.4 Coupons and promotions
Coupons are non-transferable, have no cash value, are limited to one redemption per user unless we say otherwise, and may be withdrawn at any time before redemption. The coupon's stated duration (one-time, repeating, or forever) governs how long the discount applies. Where a redemption cap is set, the coupon stops applying once the cap is reached.
3.5 Provisioning failures
If we are unable to provision your Game Server after a successful payment we will automatically refund the charge in full to the original payment method through Stripe. We retry transient failures before refunding. If the refund itself fails for reasons beyond our control we will contact you by email within two business days to arrange an alternative.
3.6 Free trials
Where we offer a free trial, the trial period and the plan it applies to are stated at checkout before you commit to anything. The current trial period is 48 hours. A trial is offered at our discretion, is subject to available capacity at the moment you start it, and may be varied or withdrawn at any time before you start one.
Starting a trial requires a verified email address and a valid payment method. The payment method is validated and stored by Stripe; no charge is made when the trial begins. Your Game Server is provisioned immediately and runs for the full trial period.
Unless you cancel before the trial period ends, the subscription begins automatically at the end of it and the first billing cycle is charged to the payment method you provided. You may cancel at any point during the trial from your dashboard, in which case nothing is charged. We will email you before the trial ends as a courtesy, but the outcome above applies whether or not that email reaches you.
If a trial ends without converting to a paid subscription, the Game Server is terminated and its data is retained and then deleted on the timescales in sections 6.2 and 9. Starting a paid plan within that window restores it.
A trial is limited to one per person. For this purpose we treat accounts sharing a billing email address, payment method, household, or network connection as the same person. A trial cannot be combined with a coupon or other promotion, cannot be used to import existing content onto the Services, and is offered instead of, not in addition to, the 7-day money-back guarantee described in our Refund Policy. A Game Server running on a trial is not covered by the service levels in section 10 and is not eligible for service credits.
3.7 Trial fair use and anti-abuse
A trial is provided so that you can evaluate the Services for your own use. You must not: create or use more than one account, email address, identity, or payment method in order to obtain more than one trial; use a trial to resell capacity or to provide a service to third parties; use a trial primarily for computation unrelated to running a Game Server, including cryptocurrency mining, password or key cracking, media transcoding, large-scale scraping, traffic proxying, or botting; use a trial as a source or staging point for attacks, spam, or unlawful material; or register for trials by automated means.
To enforce this we may process irreversible one-way representations of identity signals such as your email address, network address, linked Discord account, and payment-method fingerprint, together with resource-usage and capacity telemetry from the Game Server itself. Where those signals indicate that a trial is being used in breach of this section, we may suspend the Game Server pending review, refuse the trial, terminate it without notice under section 9, and decline to offer you a trial in future. We do not disclose the methods or thresholds we use, and we do not commit to detecting every breach.
Where a suspension under this section turns out to be mistaken, contact support@hostdservers.com and we will restore the Game Server and, where the remaining trial time was materially reduced, extend it by the time lost. Abuse of a trial is a material breach of these Terms and may also be a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy.
4. Cancellation and Refunds
You may cancel a subscription at any time from your dashboard. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period; the Game Server remains available until then. Refunds are governed by our Refund Policy, including the 7-day money-back guarantee for new customers. Nothing in these Terms limits any statutory cancellation right you have under consumer-protection law in your country of residence, including the 14-day "cooling-off" right for UK and EU consumers (subject to the express request to begin performance described in the Refund Policy).
5. Acceptable Use
Your use of the Services is subject to our Acceptable Use Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference. Breach of that policy is a material breach of these Terms.
6. Your Content and Data
6.1 Ownership
You retain all rights to the world files, save data, configuration, plugins, mods, and other content you upload to or generate on your Game Servers ("Your Content"). You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, copy, transmit, snapshot, and restore Your Content solely to provide the Services to you, and to keep audit records as described below.
6.2 Backups (snapshots)
We take automated snapshots of Game Server volumes ("Snapshots") and store them off-node in a different facility from the Game Server. The default rolling retention is the seven most recent daily Snapshots and the four most recent weekly Snapshots per Game Server. Snapshots are retained for fourteen days after a Game Server is terminated and are then permanently deleted.
Snapshots are provided on a reasonable-efforts basis and are not guaranteed. We may modify, suspend, or discontinue the Snapshot service, change retention, or fail to produce a particular Snapshot without liability. You are ultimately responsible for exporting and retaining copies of anything you cannot afford to lose; the browser file manager and the customer-initiated backup-download feature exist for that purpose. The limitations of our liability for any data loss are in section 11.
6.3 Audit log
We record significant events on your account (sign-in attempts, billing actions, server lifecycle events, file operations, role changes, and similar) together with the IP address and user-agent that performed them. We use this log to investigate incidents, detect abuse, and respond to your support requests.
6.4 Removal
We may remove content we reasonably believe infringes intellectual-property rights, violates the Acceptable Use Policy, or is required to be removed by law. Where practicable we will notify you in advance and give you a reasonable opportunity to respond.
6.5 Data protection
Our processing of personal data is described in our Privacy Policy. For customers in the UK or EEA, in respect of personal data contained within Your Content we act as a data processor and will process such data only on your documented instructions, consistent with UK GDPR / EU GDPR Article 28. A data-processing addendum incorporating Standard Contractual Clauses is available on request to legal@hostdservers.com.
6.6 Automated content review
We may inspect content you upload, store, or transfer through the Services for malware, abuse, illegal material, and other safety or operational signals. Where such inspection identifies a risk we may block, quarantine, or remove the content, suspend the affected Game Server, or take other steps reasonable in the circumstances. We do not commit to inspecting any particular item of content, do not disclose the methods or thresholds we use, and make no warranty that any automated review will detect every threat. You remain responsible for the content you place on the Services.
7. Intellectual Property
Hostd and its licensors own all right, title, and interest in the Services, including the dashboard, APIs, documentation, trademarks, and underlying software. No rights are granted to you except the limited right to use the Services in accordance with these Terms. You must not copy, modify, reverse-engineer, or create derivative works of the Services, except to the extent that applicable law expressly permits despite this restriction.
8. Third-Party Services
The Services integrate with third parties including Stripe (payments and tax), SendGrid (transactional email), OVH (compute, network, DNS for assigned subdomains, DDoS mitigation, and Backup Storage), Cloudflare (R2 backup storage where enabled), Discord (optional account linking and entitlement verification), and the catalogues operated by CurseForge and Modrinth (modpack metadata and artefact downloads). The publishers of any game whose dedicated-server software you run are also third parties for the purposes of these Terms. Your use of those integrations is subject to the respective providers' terms. We are not responsible for outages, policy changes, or pricing changes imposed by third parties; where a third party causes an outage we will use reasonable efforts to mitigate the impact on you.
9. Suspension and Termination
We may suspend or terminate your account, any Game Server, or your access to the Services without liability if: (a) you breach these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) a payment is overdue by more than 14 days; (c) we are required to do so by law, court order, or valid regulatory request; or (d) continuing to provide the Services would create a material risk to us, our network, our staff, or other customers.
Where the suspension is for non-payment or a non-urgent breach we will give you reasonable notice and an opportunity to cure. For urgent issues, including active abuse, an attack against our network, or an immediate threat to other customers, we may act without prior notice and explain afterwards.
On termination you lose access to Your Content unless you have already exported it. We retain Your Content for 14 days after termination and then permanently delete it.
10. Service Level Agreement
10.1 Target availability
We target 99.9% monthly uptime for the control-plane dashboard and for Game Servers in a healthy running state. Uptime is calculated per calendar month as (total minutes in the month minus unscheduled downtime minutes) divided by total minutes.
10.2 Exclusions
The following are not counted as unscheduled downtime: (a) scheduled maintenance for which we give at least 48 hours' notice by email or in-dashboard banner; (b) emergency security patches applied to mitigate an active vulnerability; (c) outages caused by the game publisher's servers, authentication systems, or server binaries, or by mods, plugins, or modpacks installed by the customer; (d) outages caused by third-party networks or services outside our reasonable control, including OVH, Cloudflare, Stripe, SendGrid, Discord, CurseForge, Modrinth, and the public internet; (e) customer-induced incidents (resource exhaustion within the customer's plan, customer-initiated stop or restart, customer misconfiguration); (f) suspension under section 3.3 or section 9; (g) force-majeure events.
10.3 Service credits
If monthly uptime for your Game Server falls below the 99.9% target in a given calendar month and you were an active paying customer for that month, you may request a service credit against your next invoice at the following rates: 99.0% to 99.9% gives a 10% credit; 95.0% to 99.0% gives a 25% credit; below 95.0% gives a 50% credit. Service credits are your sole and exclusive remedy for any failure to meet this SLA. Requests must be submitted via the support dashboard within 30 days of the end of the affected month and must include the approximate windows of unavailability. Credits are applied to your next renewal invoice, are not redeemable for cash, and expire if unused on termination of the account.
10.4 Changes to the Services
We may modify, suspend, or discontinue non-core features on reasonable notice. Material adverse changes that affect you will be announced by email at least 30 days in advance unless required sooner by law or to address a security issue.
11. Warranties and Liability
The Services are provided "as is" and "as available" and, to the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all implied warranties including merchantability, satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. Nothing in these Terms limits either party's liability for: death or personal injury caused by negligence; fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or any other liability that cannot be excluded or limited by applicable law (including, for consumers, statutory rights under the UK Consumer Rights Act 2015 or equivalent consumer-protection legislation).
Subject to the preceding paragraph, our aggregate liability in contract, tort (including negligence), or otherwise arising out of or in connection with the Services is limited to the total fees you paid us in the 12 months immediately preceding the event giving rise to the claim. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive, or exemplary damages, lost profits, lost goodwill, lost business, or loss of data. Section 10 sets out your sole remedy for availability failures.
12. Indemnity
Where you are using the Services in the course of a business or trade, you will indemnify and hold harmless Hostd, its directors, employees, and agents against any third-party claim arising from Your Content, your use of the Services in breach of these Terms, or your breach of the Acceptable Use Policy, including reasonable legal fees. This clause does not apply to you as a consumer to the extent an indemnity would be inconsistent with applicable consumer-protection law.
13. Governing Law and Venue
These Terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales. The courts of England have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, subject to any mandatory consumer-protection rights you have in your country of residence: consumers in the UK or EEA may bring proceedings in their local courts where required by applicable law, and may use the EU Online Dispute Resolution platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr where eligible.
14. Complaints and Out-of-Court Resolution
If something has gone wrong, please email support@hostdservers.com first; we aim to respond to complaints within five business days and to resolve them within 30 days. If we have not resolved your complaint to your satisfaction, eligible UK or EU consumers may refer the matter to a competent alternative-dispute-resolution body in their country of residence. We are not currently a member of any specific ADR scheme.
15. Notices
We give notice to you by email to the address registered to your account or by a banner in the dashboard. You give notice to us by email to legal@hostdservers.com (legal notices) or support@hostdservers.com (operational matters). Notices are deemed received on the next business day after sending.
16. Changes to the Terms
We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be notified by email at least 14 days before they take effect, and the "Effective" date at the top of this page will be updated. Continued use of the Services after the effective date constitutes acceptance. If you object to a change you may cancel under section 4 before it takes effect.
17. Miscellaneous
These Terms, together with the Acceptable Use Policy, the Privacy Policy, the Cookie Policy, and the Refund Policy, constitute the entire agreement between you and us in relation to the Services and supersede any prior agreement on the same subject matter. If any provision is held to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in force. Failure to enforce a right is not a waiver of that right. You may not assign these Terms without our prior written consent; we may assign them as part of a corporate reorganisation or sale of substantially all of our assets, on notice to you.
18. Contact
Operational and support questions: support@hostdservers.com. Legal notices: legal@hostdservers.com. Abuse reports: abuse@hostdservers.com.