This policy is part of the Terms & Conditions and applies to everything you run on our machines and everything you do with your account. It exists because our network is shared: one server attacking somebody gets the whole range blocked, and then everybody's players cannot connect.
It is written in terms of behaviour rather than technology. If something you want to do is not listed and you are not sure, ask at support@ghostnode.gg before you do it. We are not looking for reasons to close accounts.
The short version
Do not break the law. Do not attack anybody. Do not use more than your plan sold you. Do not put our network or our other customers at risk. Run your community however you like within that.
Illegal content and conduct
You must not use the service to store, transmit, host or link to anything that is illegal where you are, where we are, or where the server is. That includes, without being an exhaustive list:
- Child sexual abuse material. There is no context in which this is tolerated. We report it to law enforcement and to the relevant hotline, preserve evidence, and terminate the account immediately and without refund. There is no appeal.
- Content that incites or facilitates terrorism or violent extremism.
- Material that harasses, threatens, stalks or defames a specific person.
- Content that infringes somebody else's copyright, trade mark or other rights — including pirated games, leaked assets, cracked resources and paid scripts redistributed without a licence. Reporting routes are in Abuse & Copyright.
- Fraud, phishing pages, fake shops, and anything designed to deceive people out of money.
- The sale or distribution of controlled drugs, weapons, stolen data or stolen credentials.
- Content that is obscene in a way that would be criminal, or that sexualises minors in any form.
Attacks and network abuse
You must not use the service to attack anything, ours or anybody else's. Specifically:
- No denial of service. No DDoS, no booters or stressers, no reflection or amplification, no participating in a botnet. This applies whether the target is ours, a rival community's, or somebody who annoyed you in chat.
- No scanning or intrusion. No port scanning, vulnerability scanning, brute forcing or credential stuffing against hosts you do not own, and no attempting to reach another customer's server, container or database.
- No spam. No bulk unsolicited email, no mass Discord invitations, no spam relays, no open proxies.
- No malware. No hosting, distributing or command-and-control for viruses, ransomware, RATs, keyloggers, stealers, or the infrastructure that supports them.
- No anonymising services for other people — open VPN endpoints, Tor exit nodes, public proxies. The traffic arrives attributed to us and we cannot answer for it.
- No forging of packet headers, IP addresses or email headers.
Anything in this section gets a server suspended immediately and without notice, because the alternative is our address ranges being blocked while we wait for a reply.
Resource use
Your plan sells you a specific amount of CPU, memory, disk and player slots, and you may use all of it, all the time. That is what it is for. What you may not do is take somebody else's:
- No cryptocurrency mining, of any coin, by any method. It is not a grey area and it will be stopped.
- No using a game server as a general-purpose compute or file host — no media libraries, no torrent seeding, no bulk file distribution, no rendering, no model training. Buy a machine for that; it is not what this is.
- No deliberately evading the limits of your plan, and no running processes designed to consume shared resources rather than to run your game.
- No reselling the service to third parties without our written agreement. Your friends playing on your server is the entire point; renting slices of your container out as hosting is not.
Where use is affecting other customers on the same machine we will contact you first and work out what is going on. Deliberate abuse is different from a script with a memory leak, and we can tell the difference.
Your community
How you moderate your own server is your business, and we are not in it. We do not read your chat logs looking for things to object to, and we will not act on a report that amounts to a disagreement between communities.
What we will act on is content that is illegal, or conduct directed at a real person that crosses into harassment, doxxing or threats. If you run a community that welcomes people, you also take on the job of removing the ones who use it to hurt somebody. If your server becomes a persistent source of that, it becomes our problem too.
You are responsible for what your players do on your server. That is not a threat; it is the consequence of you being the controller of it.
Security of your own server
You must keep your account secure — a real password, two-step sign in, and sub-users given only the permissions they need. You must not knowingly run a compromised or backdoored resource, and you must act promptly when we tell you one is.
A compromised server is usually somebody else's problem before it is yours: it gets used to attack a third party. We may suspend it to stop that while you clean it up, and we will help you do so.
What happens when this is breached
In roughly this order, depending on what has happened:
- We tell you, with what we found and what needs to change, and give you a reasonable time to fix it. This is what happens for most things.
- We suspend the server — stopped, files intact — where the problem is ongoing, is harming somebody, or you have not responded. Suspension is reversible.
- We terminate the account for a serious breach, a repeated one, or where the content is criminal. Termination deletes the data and is not reversible, and there is no refund.
We skip straight to suspension or termination where there is an active attack, an active compromise, criminal content, or a legal order requiring it.
We decide whether this policy has been breached, acting reasonably, and we do not have to wait for a court to tell us that something is illegal before we act on it. Where we act, we are not liable for what the suspension or termination costs you, and terminating for a breach does not earn a refund — see the Terms & Conditions.
Costs. Where your breach costs us money — staff time on an abuse complaint, bandwidth absorbed during an attack your server invited, a machine rebuilt after your compromise, a fine or claim we have to answer — we may recover those costs from you if you are a business customer, and you indemnify us for third-party claims under the Terms.
We may preserve and disclose what we hold about your account and your server to law enforcement, to a regulator, or to a party bringing a claim, where the law requires it or where it is necessary to investigate a breach of this policy or to defend ourselves.
If you think we have got it wrong, reply to the notice. A person reads it. We have restored accounts before and will again where the evidence supports it — the only category with no appeal is the first item under Illegal content and conduct.
Reporting a breach of this policy
Email support@ghostnode.gg with the connection address or server name, what you saw, and when. Evidence helps enormously — logs, screenshots, timestamps with a timezone. We treat reports confidentially and do not pass your details to the person you reported.
Copyright complaints, and requests from law enforcement, have their own route in Abuse & Copyright.
GhostNode Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales, company number 17414337. Registered office: 66 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4NA, United Kingdom. General enquiries support@ghostnode.gg; anything about personal data dpo@ghostnode.gg.