Legal
Acceptable use policy
This policy exists so that one customer cannot ruin the network for everyone else. It is deliberately specific: you should be able to read it and know whether your project is welcome here.
1. The principle
You may run almost anything on a FlowVDS server. The exceptions fall into two groups: things that are illegal, and things that damage the network, its reputation, or other customers. Everything below is an application of one of those two ideas.
We are a hosting provider, not an arbiter of opinion. We do not remove lawful content because somebody complained about it. We do act, quickly, on anything in the list that follows.
2. Prohibited outright
- Child sexual abuse material. Reported to the authorities, account terminated, no notice, no refund, no appeal.
- Content or activity that is illegal under the laws of the United Arab Emirates or of the country hosting the server.
- Distribution of malware, ransomware, exploit kits, or infrastructure operating a botnet or command-and-control channel.
- Phishing, credential harvesting, and sites impersonating a bank, a payment provider, a government service or any other organisation.
- Unsolicited bulk email, and hosting any part of the infrastructure supporting a spam operation, including the websites it advertises.
- Denial-of-service attacks, stress-testing services aimed at third parties, and network scanning of hosts you do not control.
- Unauthorised access to any system, and the storage or trade of credentials, card data or personal data obtained unlawfully.
- Infringing distribution of copyrighted material where you have no right to distribute it.
3. Restricted, but allowed with agreement
- Outbound mail. Port 25 is closed on new accounts. Tell us what you intend to send, to whom, and how the list was built, and we will open it for accounts that check out.
- Public proxies, VPNs and Tor. Permitted, including Tor relays. Tor exit nodes are permitted only in specific locations and only after you have discussed it with us, because they generate abuse volume that we have to be staffed for.
- Crawlers and scrapers. Permitted where they respect robots directives and rate limits. Aggressive crawling that draws complaints will be treated as abuse.
- Cryptocurrency. Nodes, wallets, RPC endpoints and validators are fine. Proof-of-work mining is not: it saturates shared CPU and is not viable on this hardware anyway.
- Adult content. Lawful adult material is permitted where it is legal in the hosting country and all participants are verifiably adults. It is not permitted in every location we serve — ask first.
4. Resource use
Transfer described as unmetered is not counted and is not invoiced as overage. The 1 Gbps port is the practical limit. What we ask is that sustained use looks like an application serving users rather than a deliberate attempt to move as much data as physically possible for its own sake.
If your server is affecting others on the same hypervisor — sustained CPU saturation across every core, or disk activity that degrades neighbours — we will contact you and discuss a larger plan or a dedicated machine before we take any action. Throttling without a conversation first is not how we work.
5. How abuse reports are handled
Reports go to abuse@flowvds.com. A usable report contains the IP address, timestamps with a timezone, and raw log lines or headers. Reports without evidence cannot be acted on and will be answered saying so.
We acknowledge reports within 24 hours. In most cases we forward the report to the customer with a deadline to respond, because most abuse is a compromised server rather than a malicious owner. Where the activity is ongoing and harmful, we suspend first and forward second.
6. Consequences
Depending on severity: a notice with a deadline to fix; suspension of the server; termination of the service; or termination of the account. For anything in the "prohibited outright" list, expect termination without notice and without refund, and referral to the relevant authorities where the law requires it.
If you think we have got it wrong, reply to the notice. We do review these, and we do reverse decisions when the evidence supports it.
Questions about this document go to legal@flowvds.com.