Terms of Service

September 2026

These terms describe what you get, what it costs, what happens when something goes wrong, and what we will and will not be responsible for. They are written to be read. If anything here is unclear, ask us before you order rather than after.

1. Acceptance of these terms

• These Terms of Service are an agreement between PanicHost LLC ("PanicHost", "we", "us" or "our") and you, covering the PanicHost website and every product and service we make available through it (together, the "Services"). By ordering or using the Services you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the Services.
• PanicHost is registered in the State of Colorado, United States.
• These terms are also governed by our Privacy Notice and, where you register a domain, by the domain terms in section 10 below.

2. Who may open an account

• You must be at least 18, or the age of majority where you live, and able to enter a binding contract. If you open an account for an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.
• The details you give us must be accurate and kept up to date. We use them to bill you, to reach you about your service, and, for domains, to meet registry requirements. An account with knowingly false details may be suspended.
• One person or organisation may hold more than one account. Opening additional accounts to evade a suspension, a chargeback or a resource limit is not permitted.

3. What we provide

• Shared hosting is provided on cPanel servers we operate. Game servers run on nodes we operate. Our VPS range is capacity we purchase from established infrastructure providers and operate on top of, with our own provisioning, monitoring and support. We say so plainly rather than implying we own every machine.
• Specifications, included features and prices for each plan are those shown on the relevant product page at the time you order. Those pages are generated from our live catalogue, so what you see is what you are charged.
• We may change, add to or withdraw a plan. If a change materially reduces what you already pay for, we will tell you before it takes effect and you may cancel for a pro-rata refund of the unused term.
• Managed means different things on different plans. We are responsible for the hardware, network and hypervisor on every plan. On a VPS or dedicated server the operating system and everything you install on it are yours to run.

4. Fees, terms and renewal

• Services are billed in advance on the term you choose: monthly, quarterly, six monthly or annually. Annual terms on shared hosting and VPS are discounted against the monthly rate, and the discount is shown at checkout.
• Hosting renews at the price you signed up at. We do not run an introductory rate that increases at renewal. If we ever need to change the price of a plan you already hold, we will give you at least 30 days notice before a renewal and you may cancel instead.
• Domains are the exception, because registries set their own renewal prices and for many extensions the first year is discounted. Both the first year price and the renewal price are shown before you buy.
• Payments are processed by Stripe. We never receive or store your full card number. We hold only a token that lets us charge the card you have authorised.
• Prices are exclusive of any sales tax, VAT or equivalent, which is added where we are required to charge it.
• Services renew automatically unless you cancel before the renewal date. You can cancel at any time from your dashboard.

5. Money-back guarantee, cancellation and refunds

• Money-back guarantee on your first order of a hosting plan. The window depends on the term you chose: 7 days on a monthly plan and 30 days on a yearly plan, counted from the date of that order. Tell us inside the window and we refund that payment in full, to the card you paid with, not as account credit.
• The window is shorter on monthly plans for a plain reason: a month-long window on a month-long term is a free month, and we pay for the machine whether you keep it or not. A week is enough to find out whether the service does what you need.
• One refund per customer. The guarantee covers a genuine first try, not a repeating cycle of ordering and refunding.
• Setup fees, add-ons and overages are not refundable, and neither is any part of a term you have already used beyond the window.
• Domain registrations, transfers and renewals are never refundable. The registry charges us the moment you order and does not refund us. If you took a free domain with an annual plan and then claim the refund, you keep the domain and we deduct what it cost us from the amount returned.
• Orders placed before September 2026 keep the previous 30 day window for their current term. We do not shorten a window you already bought under.
• Outside the window, cancelling stops the next renewal. We do not refund the unused part of a term you have already paid for, unless we withdrew or materially changed the service, in which case you may cancel for a pro-rata refund of the unused term.
• The guarantee covers your first term on a given plan. It does not cover renewals.
• If you dispute a charge with your bank rather than contacting us first, we may suspend the account while the dispute is resolved. Please just ask us.

6. Late payment, suspension and termination

• If a payment fails, your card is retried automatically and your service keeps running for three days. If the invoice is still unpaid after that, the service is suspended, not deleted, and your data is retained. Settle the invoice and the service is restored.
• A service that remains suspended and unpaid may be terminated, and its data deleted, after a further 14 days. We will email you before that happens. Once data is deleted we cannot recover it.
• We may suspend a service immediately, without the grace period above, where it is being used in breach of section 7, where it threatens the stability or security of our platform or another customer, or where we are required to by law or by a provider upstream of us.
• You may close your account at any time. Closing it cancels the services on it at the end of their current terms.

7. Acceptable use

• You are responsible for everything on your service and everything done through it, including by your own users and clients.
• You must not use the Services to host, send or facilitate: material that is unlawful where you or your visitors are; child sexual abuse material, which we report to the relevant authorities without exception; malware, phishing pages, or credential harvesting; unsolicited bulk email; content that infringes someone else's copyright or trade marks; or attacks on any network or system, including port scanning, denial of service and brute forcing.
• You must not run open mail relays, open proxies, public DNS resolvers or anything else that can be abused by third parties to attack others.
• Cryptocurrency mining is not permitted on shared hosting or game servers. It is permitted on a VPS or dedicated server only within the resources you have paid for.
• Report abuse to /abuse. We investigate every report and will normally contact the customer before acting, unless the content is of a kind that requires immediate removal.

8. Resource usage and fair use

• Shared hosting is shared. Unmetered bandwidth means we do not bill you per gigabyte, not that a single account may consume a server. Accounts are subject to per-account CPU, memory, process and I/O limits, which are applied by the platform rather than by us watching you.
• If your site outgrows shared hosting we will tell you and help you move to a VPS. We would rather move you than throttle you quietly.
• Storage is for the operation of your website, application or game server. It is not a general file archive or backup destination for unrelated data.
• Game servers are sized by RAM, CPU and disk. Player slots are not limited and are not charged for, because they cost us nothing.

9. Backups are shared responsibility

• We take daily backups of shared hosting accounts and keep them as a courtesy and for our own disaster recovery. We will restore from them where we can.
• They are not a substitute for your own backups. We do not guarantee that a backup exists, is complete, or is recoverable at the moment you need it, and we do not accept liability for lost data. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.
• VPS and dedicated servers are not backed up by us unless you have bought a backup service. What runs on the machine is yours to protect.

10. Availability and service credits

• 99.9% monthly uptime on VPS and dedicated servers. If we fall below that in a calendar month, you can claim a credit of 5% of the monthly fee for the affected service for each full hour of downtime, up to 100% of that month. Claim by emailing us within 30 days of the end of the affected month and we will check our monitoring against your report. Credit is applied to your account against future invoices. Shared hosting and game servers run from a single location and are not covered by this commitment; we support them on a best efforts basis and will still put right anything that is our fault.
• Planned maintenance is announced in advance where we can. Emergency maintenance needed to keep the platform secure may happen without notice.
• Availability does not cover downtime caused by your own software or configuration, by an attack on your service that is not a failure of our network, or by events outside our reasonable control.

11. Domain registration

• Domains are registered in your name, with you as the registrant. The domain is yours, not ours, and you may transfer it away once it is outside the registry lock that follows registration or transfer.
• Registration is subject to the rules of the registry for that extension and, for generic extensions, to ICANN policy, including the Registrar Accreditation Agreement and the dispute resolution policy (UDRP).
• You must keep your registrant contact details accurate. Registries require this, and a domain with details that are demonstrably false can be suspended by the registry.
• We will remind you before a domain expires, but keeping a registration current is ultimately yours. A domain that expires may enter a redemption period with a registry fee to recover it, and after that may be released to anyone.
• A free domain included with an annual hosting plan covers the first year only, from the list of extensions shown at checkout. It renews at its normal price after that, which we show you before you order.

12. Your content

• Everything you upload or create on the Services remains yours. We claim no ownership of it.
• You grant us only the permission we need to actually run the service: to store, copy and transmit your content in order to host it, to make backups, and to show it to visitors of your site. That permission ends when the content is deleted.
• You confirm you have the rights to everything you put on the Services. We respond to valid copyright complaints and will remove infringing material.

13. Account security

• You are responsible for your account credentials and for anything done with them. Use a strong, unique password.
• Account passwords are stored hashed and cannot be read by anyone here. Server and control panel credentials are encrypted at rest.
• If you grant another person access to your account, they can do what you granted and no more. Access to billing is never granted by the manager role, and you can revoke any access at any time from your account settings.
• Tell us immediately if you believe your account has been accessed without your permission.

14. Data protection

• How we handle your personal data is set out in our Privacy Notice.
• Where you host other people's personal data on our Services, you are the controller of that data and we are your processor. You are responsible for having a lawful basis for it, for telling those people how it is used, and for answering their requests. We process it only to provide the Services to you.
• We will tell you without undue delay if we become aware of a breach affecting your data.

15. Third parties and upstream providers

• Parts of the Services depend on third parties, including our payment processor, our domain registrar, and the infrastructure providers behind our VPS range. We choose them carefully and remain your point of contact.
• Software you install, and third-party services you connect to, are governed by their own terms and are not our responsibility.

16. Disclaimer

• We work hard to keep the Services running and secure, but they are provided "as is". We do not warrant that they will be uninterrupted or error free, that any defect will be corrected, or that they will meet a particular requirement of yours, except where section 10 gives a specific commitment.
• Nothing here excludes any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

17. Limitation of liability

• Subject to the paragraph above, our total liability to you for any claim connected with the Services is limited to the amount you paid us for the affected service in the 12 months before the claim arose.
• We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, or loss of data, to the extent the law allows us to say so. This is why section 9 asks you to keep your own backups.
• Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Where that is the case, our liability is limited to the fullest extent the law allows.

18. Indemnity

• You agree to cover us against claims brought by a third party that arise from your content, your use of the Services, or your breach of these terms. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and let you take part in the defence of it.

19. Changes to these terms

• We may update these terms. If a change materially affects your rights we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and you may cancel for a pro-rata refund if you do not accept it.
• The date at the top of this page is when it was last revised.

20. Governing law and disputes

• These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, United States, without regard to its conflict of law rules. You and we agree that the state and federal courts located in Denver County, Colorado have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute that is not resolved between us directly.
• Before starting any formal proceedings, please contact us at [email protected]. Almost everything is resolved faster that way.

21. Contact

• Email [email protected], or open a ticket from your dashboard, which is the fastest route if you have an account. Abuse reports go to /abuse.
• PanicHost LLC is a limited liability company formed in Colorado. For service of process, our registered agent and its address are on public record with the Colorado Secretary of State. For everything else, email reaches us faster.