These terms are the contract between you and GhostNode Ltd (“GhostNode”, “we”, “us”) for the game server hosting and related services we supply. By creating an account or placing an order you agree to them. If you do not, do not place the order — and if something here is unclear, ask us at support@ghostnode.gg before you buy rather than after.
Please read Our liability and Your responsibility to us carefully. They limit what we owe you when something goes wrong and set out when you have to cover us. If you are in the United States, Disputes: United States customers requires most disputes to go to individual arbitration rather than to a court or a class action, and tells you how to opt out of that within 30 days.
Who we are
GhostNode Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales under number 17414337, with its registered office at 66 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4NA, United Kingdom. We are not currently registered for VAT, so our invoices do not carry a VAT line. If that changes we will say so on the invoice, not quietly in the total.
You can reach us at support@ghostnode.gg or through our Discord server. Anything about personal data goes to dpo@ghostnode.gg, which is a different inbox on purpose: a data protection request has a legal deadline and must not queue behind “my server will not start”.
Consumers and businesses
Two sets of rules run through this contract, and which one applies to you decides how several of the clauses below work.
You are a consumer if you are an individual buying wholly or mainly for purposes outside a trade, business, craft or profession. Consumer protection law then gives you rights we cannot reduce, and Your rights where you live sets out the ones that come up most. Where anything in these terms conflicts with a right you hold by law, the law wins and the rest of these terms carry on unaffected.
You are a business customer if you are buying for a business, a company, a charity, an organisation, or in the course of any trade or profession — including a community that takes donations or subscriptions from its players. Business customers do not get consumer rights, and the liability limits below apply to you in full. You confirm you are authorised to bind the organisation, and “you” in these terms means that organisation as well as you personally.
If you tell us you are a consumer when you are not, and we rely on that, we may treat the contract as a business contract from the start.
Your account
You need an account to buy from us. You must be at least 16, or 13 with a parent or guardian agreeing on your behalf and taking responsibility for the account.
Keep your sign-in details to yourself. You are responsible for everything done under your account, including by people you invite to it and including anybody who gets in because your password was weak, shared or reused. That is what the permission system is for, and why the panel records who did what rather than attributing everything to the owner. Turn on two-step sign in. If you think somebody else has got in, tell us immediately and change your password; we will help, but we cannot undo what has already been done and we are not liable for it.
One person, one account. Creating additional accounts to claim a promotion again, to get round a suspension, or to refer yourself through the affiliate programme is a breach of these terms.
Verification. Where an order or an account shows signs of fraud, we may ask you to verify your identity or your ownership of the payment method before we provision or continue the service. We may hold or decline the order until you do. We ask rarely and we do not keep documents longer than the check requires.
What we provide
A server for the game and plan you chose, on the resources that plan sets out, reachable at the connection address we give you, together with the control panel, file access, database, console and backups described on the plan at the time you bought it.
We provide the machine, the network and the panel. We do not provide the game, its mods, its resources, or your configuration. If a third-party script breaks your server, we will help you get back to a working state — that is what the snapshots and the file manager are for — but the content you run is yours and so is responsibility for it.
Except for what we promise in the Service Level Agreement and what the law requires us to promise, the service is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure against every attack, or that it will meet a requirement you had in mind but did not agree with us. For consumers, this does not affect our obligation to supply the service with reasonable care and skill.
Beta and early-access features are labelled as such and are provided without any commitment at all: they may change, break, or be withdrawn, they are outside the SLA, and using one is your decision.
We may change how the service works, and we improve it constantly. If we make a change that is materially to your disadvantage — removing a capability your plan was sold with, or reducing the resources it includes — we will tell you at least 30 days beforehand, and you may cancel and take a pro-rata refund of anything you have paid for the period after the change.
Ordering and setup
Prices are shown before you pay, in the currency displayed, and the total on the checkout page is the total. Our acceptance of your order happens when we send the confirmation email, not when you click pay — if a plan or region turns out to be unavailable, or the price shown was obviously wrong, we may decline the order and refund you in full instead.
Servers are set up automatically and usually within a couple of minutes. If provisioning fails and we cannot fix it, we refund in full.
Payment
Hosting is a subscription, billed in advance for each period, on the cycle you chose. Payments are taken by Stripe; we never see or hold your card number. Your subscription renews automatically until you cancel it, which you can do at any time from the billing page without talking to anybody.
If a payment fails we retry it and email you. If it keeps failing, the server is suspended — stopped, but still there with your files intact — and after that, if we still have not heard from you, it is terminated and the data is deleted. We tell you at each step before it happens, and reinstating a suspended server is a matter of paying the outstanding invoice. Termination is not reversible, because deletion is not reversible.
Cancelling stops the next payment. It does not refund the period you are already in — you keep the server until the end of it. What you can get back is covered by the Refund Policy.
Late payment, chargebacks and costs
Everything you owe is payable in full without deduction. You may not set off anything you say we owe you against an invoice; raise it with us instead. We may set off anything you owe us against anything we owe you, including affiliate commission and account credit.
If you are a business customer, overdue sums carry interest at the statutory rate under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, and you are liable for the reasonable costs of recovering them, including debt collection and legal costs. For consumers we charge interest at the Bank of England base rate plus 3% and nothing else.
Chargebacks. If you dispute a charge with your bank rather than with us, and the dispute is resolved in our favour, you are liable for the amount plus the fee our payment processor charges us for the dispute. We may suspend or terminate the account and refuse further service until it is settled. Filing a chargeback on a payment for a service you used, rather than asking us for a refund first, is a breach of these terms.
Prices and changes
The price you bought at is the price you keep. We do not raise the price of a plan somebody is already on. When our costs change we publish a new plan and leave the old one alone, which is why the panel can show you a plan that is no longer for sale. If we ever do have to change the price of an existing subscription, we will give you at least 30 days' notice before it takes effect and you may cancel free of charge in that time.
Changing your own plan is different: you choose it, and the panel shows you Stripe's arithmetic — what you will be charged now and what your next invoice becomes — before anything is touched. Upgrades invoice the difference immediately; downgrades leave credit against future invoices rather than paying out.
Taxes
Prices exclude any tax that applies to your purchase, which is calculated at checkout and shown separately on your invoice. If a taxing authority later determines that tax was due on a payment and not collected, you are responsible for it, except where the law places it on us. If you are a business in a jurisdiction that reverse-charges, enter your tax number at checkout — we cannot apply it retrospectively to an invoice already issued.
Your content and your players
Everything you upload or create on your server stays yours. We claim no ownership of it. We hold it in order to provide the service, and we access it only when we need to: to run the service, to keep it secure, to investigate a report of abuse, or when you ask us to help.
You warrant that you have the right to everything you put on our machines, that it does not infringe anybody's rights, and that hosting it does not put us in breach of any law. You are responsible for the licences for every mod, script and resource you run.
If your server collects information about the people who play on it — names, identifiers, chat, IP addresses, whatever your scripts record — then in data protection terms you are the controller of that data and we are your processor. That is a real legal relationship with real obligations on both sides, and the Data Processing Agreement sets them out. It applies automatically; you do not have to sign anything to get it. Telling your players what you collect and why is your job, not ours: we have no relationship with them and cannot answer for what your community does.
How you may use the service
The Acceptable Use Policy is part of this contract and sets out what may not be run on our machines. In short: nothing illegal, nothing that attacks or degrades anyone else's systems, nothing that puts our network or our other customers at risk, and nothing that abuses the resources your plan sold you.
You must not resell the service, reverse engineer the panel, attempt to gain access to any part of our systems you were not given, or use automated means to interrogate our infrastructure beyond the API we published for you.
Your responsibility to us
This section applies to business customers in full. If you are a consumer it applies only to loss we suffer because of your deliberate breach or your negligence, and never beyond what consumer law permits.
You will indemnify us — meaning cover our loss, including reasonable legal costs — against any claim, demand, fine or proceeding brought by a third party, a regulator or a law enforcement body that arises out of:
- the content you host, store or transmit on our machines;
- anything done by your players, your staff or your sub-users on your server;
- your breach of these terms, the Acceptable Use Policy, or the Data Processing Agreement;
- your infringement of somebody's intellectual property, including running a paid resource you do not hold a licence for;
- your handling of your players' personal data, including a failure to tell them what you collect or to answer them when they ask;
- your breach of any law that applies to you or to what you are running.
We will tell you promptly about a claim we want covered, let you take conduct of the defence if you confirm in writing that the indemnity applies, and not settle without your agreement, which you will not withhold unreasonably. We may take part in the defence at our own cost.
Sanctions and lawful use
You confirm that you are not, and are not acting for, a person or entity subject to sanctions administered by the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States or the United Nations, and that you are not located in a country subject to comprehensive sanctions. You will not make the service available to any such person, and you will comply with all applicable export control and sanctions law.
We may suspend or terminate immediately, without refund, if this stops being true or if we are required to by any such regime. This is not a discretion we can negotiate away.
Suspension and termination
We may suspend a server immediately, without notice, where it is being used to attack somebody, where it is compromised, where an order or a payment appears fraudulent, where we are required to by law or by a valid legal order, or where leaving it running puts our network or other customers at risk. Where the problem is less urgent we will tell you what is wrong and give you a reasonable chance to fix it first.
We are not liable for loss you suffer during a suspension that we were entitled to make, and a suspended period does not count towards the SLA or earn a credit. If a suspension turns out to have been our mistake, we will restore the service and credit the time.
Where we incur costs because of your breach — handling an abuse complaint, absorbing an attack your server attracted, restoring a machine your compromise took down — we may recover those costs from you if you are a business customer.
We may end this contract on 30 days' notice for any reason, refunding the unused part of what you have paid. We may end it immediately for a serious or repeated breach of these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, for non-payment after the process above has run, on your insolvency or equivalent, or where you have used the service to harm somebody.
You may end it at any time by cancelling in the panel.
When a contract ends for any reason, we keep your server data for a short grace period so you can retrieve it, and then delete it. If we terminate for a serious breach we may delete immediately, and we will not refund. After the grace period the data is gone and we have no obligation or ability to produce it. Ask for your files before you cancel, not after.
Backups and keeping your own copy
We take backups, and the panel gives you snapshots you can restore in a click. They exist to recover from our failures and from ordinary accidents, and they work — but they are not a substitute for your own copy. We do not guarantee that any particular backup exists, is complete, or can be restored at the moment you need it, and a backup is not a service we sell you separately.
Keeping your own copies is your responsibility. The file manager will let you download the lot, and SFTP will do it faster for a large server. Where data is lost and you had no copy of your own, that is a factor in what we owe you.
Availability
We aim to keep everything up all the time and we publish what the machines are actually doing on our status page. The specific commitment, what is excluded from it, and the credit you are entitled to when we miss it are in the Service Level Agreement, which is part of this contract. Service credits are the only remedy the SLA gives you, and they count towards the cap below.
Our liability
Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited — including, for consumers, our obligation to supply a service with reasonable care and skill, and any liability under the data protection legislation that cannot be excluded.
Subject to that:
What we are not liable for at all
- Loss of profit, revenue, business, contracts, goodwill, anticipated savings, or the value of a community you built, in each case whether direct or indirect.
- Loss or corruption of data, beyond restoring what we actually hold in backup at the time.
- Anything done by your players, your sub-users, or a third-party script, mod, plugin or game platform — none of which we wrote or control.
- Any failure caused by your own configuration, your own hardware, your own network, or your failure to keep your own copy of your data.
- Denial of service attacks beyond the mitigation capacity in place at the datacentre.
- Indirect or consequential loss of any kind.
The cap
Our total liability to you, for everything arising out of or in connection with this contract in aggregate, is limited to the amount you actually paid us in the 12 months immediately before the event giving rise to the claim. That single cap covers every claim of every kind together — contract, tort, negligence, statute, the SLA and the Data Processing Agreement included — rather than applying afresh to each one. Service credits already given are counted against it.
If you are a business customer, you also agree that any claim must be brought within 12 months of the date you became aware, or ought reasonably to have become aware, of the circumstances giving rise to it, after which it is barred.
If you are a business customer, you accept that this allocation of risk is reflected in the price — hosting sold at these prices cannot also carry unlimited exposure — and that the limits above are reasonable in that light. Sections 3, 6 and 7 of the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 and the terms implied by section 13 of the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 are excluded to the fullest extent the law allows.
If you are a consumer, the cap above applies only so far as consumer law permits, and where it does not, our liability is limited to loss that was reasonably foreseeable at the time we made this contract.
Your rights where you live
Consumer protection is territorial, and we sell in a lot of places. This section says which rules we apply to you. Where any of them give you more than these terms do, they override these terms to the extent of the difference.
United Kingdom
Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 our service must be provided with reasonable care and skill, within a reasonable time, and match how we described it. If it is not, you are entitled to have it put right or to a price reduction. Under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 you have 14 days to cancel an online purchase — and because you asked us at checkout to start setting your server up straight away, that right ends once the service has been fully performed. The two tick boxes you saw before paying are what record that. Our own Refund Policy is more generous than the statutory minimum and applies whether or not the statutory right still runs.
European Economic Area
If you are a consumer in the EEA you have a 14-day right of withdrawal under the Consumer Rights Directive, which works the same way as the UK right above: it ends when the service has been fully performed, where you expressly requested performance to begin during the withdrawal period and acknowledged you would lose the right — which is exactly what the checkout asked you. You also keep the mandatory consumer protections of the country you live in, including its rules on unfair contract terms, and nothing in these terms deprives you of the protection of your local law.
Complaints can be brought to the consumer protection authority in your own country. The European Commission's online dispute resolution platform closed in July 2025, so please write to us first — most of what reaches a complaints body would have been settled by an email.
United States
Federal and state law give you rights that vary by where you live, and nothing here limits them. US consumers do not generally have a statutory cooling-off period for an online service purchase, so what you have is our own 72-hour guarantee, which we honour as written. Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or of incidental or consequential damages, so the limits above apply to you only as far as your state permits. Automatic renewal is disclosed at checkout, we email before each renewal, and cancellation is a button in the panel rather than a phone call — which is what California's and New York's automatic renewal laws require and what we would want anyway.
Australia
Our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law. You are entitled to a replacement or refund for a major failure and to compensation for any other reasonably foreseeable loss or damage. You are also entitled to have the services remedied within a reasonable time or, if that is not done, to cancel the contract and get a refund of any unused part. Nothing in these terms limits those rights. Where the Australian Consumer Law permits us to limit our liability for a failure to comply with a guarantee, our liability is limited to resupplying the services or paying the cost of having them resupplied.
New Zealand
If you are a consumer, the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 and the Fair Trading Act 1986 apply and nothing here excludes them. If you acquire our services for the purposes of a business, you agree that the Consumer Guarantees Act does not apply, and that sections 9, 12A and 13 of the Fair Trading Act do not apply, which is an agreement the Act permits between businesses and which we both accept is fair and reasonable.
Elsewhere in Asia and Oceania
We supply customers across Asia and the Pacific and apply the mandatory consumer rules of your own country where they are more favourable than these terms — including Singapore's Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act, Japan's Consumer Contract Act and Act on Specified Commercial Transactions, and equivalent legislation elsewhere. If you believe a term here conflicts with a protection you hold at home, write to us and we will apply the local rule rather than argue about it.
Changes to these terms
We will change these terms from time to time. For minor changes — a clearer sentence, a new address — we update the page and the date at the top of it. For anything that materially affects your rights or obligations we will email you at least 30 days beforehand, and if you do not want to accept the change you may cancel before it takes effect and take a pro-rata refund of anything paid for the period afterwards. Carrying on using the service after a change takes effect means you accept it.
Complaints and disputes
Write to support@ghostnode.gg first, with your account email and what happened. We aim to acknowledge within one working day and to resolve within ten. Nearly everything is settled at this stage, and it costs neither of us anything.
Both of us agree to try that first. Neither of us will start proceedings about something we have not raised with the other and given 30 days to resolve, except where an injunction is genuinely needed to stop ongoing harm or to protect intellectual property.
If we cannot resolve it between us, you keep every right you have to take the matter to the courts or to a consumer body in your own country. We are not currently signed up to an alternative dispute resolution scheme, and we would rather say so than imply one exists.
Disputes: United States customers
This section applies only if you are resident in the United States, and it affects how disputes between us are resolved. Read it. It does not apply to anyone outside the United States, whose rights are covered by Your rights where you live and Governing law.
You and we agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the service will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, rather than in court, and that the Federal Arbitration Act governs this section. The arbitration may be conducted by documents, telephone or video, and judgment on the award may be entered in any court with jurisdiction.
You and we each waive the right to a jury trial, and each agree to bring claims only in an individual capacity and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated or representative proceeding. An arbitrator may not consolidate claims or preside over any form of representative proceeding.
Two things are carved out. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small claims court if it qualifies, and either of us may seek an injunction in court to stop infringement or misuse of intellectual property.
How to opt out. You may reject this section by emailing support@ghostnode.gg with the subject Arbitration opt-out, from the address on your account, within 30 days of first accepting these terms. Say that you are opting out and give your account email. That is all it takes; opting out costs you nothing, changes nothing else about your service, and we will not treat you differently for it. If you opt out, disputes go to the courts as set out under Governing law.
If the class action waiver above is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim alone leaves arbitration and goes to court, and the rest of this section still stands. If this entire section is found unenforceable, Governing law applies instead.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute.
If you are a consumer, that does not take anything away from you. You keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the country you live in, and you can bring proceedings in your own local courts. The clause above settles which law applies to a commercial dispute; it is not an attempt to make you litigate in London over a hosting bill.
What survives the end
Ending the contract does not end everything in it. These carry on afterwards: Your responsibility to us, Our liability, the payment obligations you had already incurred, Disputes: United States customers, Governing law, and anything else which by its nature is meant to.
General
Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under this contract without our agreement, which we will not withhold unreasonably. We may transfer ours to a company that takes over our business, and we will tell you if we do; if the transfer is to your disadvantage you may cancel and take a pro-rata refund.
Severability. If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, that part is modified to the least extent needed to make it enforceable, or removed if it cannot be, and the rest carries on.
Waiver. If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
Events outside our control. Neither of us is liable for failing to do something made impossible by events genuinely outside our control — a datacentre fire, a national network outage, a failure at an upstream provider, war, a change in the law. Where such an event lasts more than 30 days either of us may end the contract, and we refund the unused part of what you have paid.
Third parties. Nobody other than you and us has rights under this contract.
Notices. We write to the email address on your account, so keep it current; a notice we send there counts as given the day it is sent. You write to support@ghostnode.gg, or to our registered office if you need it in writing. You agree to receive contractual notices electronically.
The whole agreement. These terms, together with the Acceptable Use Policy, the Refund Policy, the Service Level Agreement, the Privacy Policy and — where they apply — the Data Processing Agreement and the Affiliate Terms, are the entire contract between us. They replace anything said beforehand, and you confirm you have not relied on any statement, promise or representation that is not written in them. That does not exclude liability for anything we told you fraudulently.
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.