Acceptable use policy

This acceptable use policy applies to all HostOn services and forms part of the Terms and Conditions. In the event of any conflict, the Terms and Conditions prevail. The customer is also responsible for compliance by its employees, agents, users of its website and all persons to whom it grants access.

Violations may lead to immediate suspension, termination without notice and charging for the effort incurred (sections 6 and 8 of the Terms and Conditions). We may report criminal acts to the authorities.

It is prohibited to store, publish, link to or distribute content that breaches Swiss law or the law of the target country, in particular:

• depictions of sexual acts involving minors, depictions of violence, prohibited pornography and pornographic content without effective age verification;
• racist or discriminatory content, content glorifying violence or inciting criminal offences, terrorist propaganda;
• content that infringes copyright, trademark, design or personality rights (e.g. pirated copies, counterfeit branded goods, defamation);
• phishing pages, fake shops, fraudulent offers, pyramid schemes and unlicensed gambling;
• malware, exploits, botnet control systems and instructions for using them against third parties;
• sale of prohibited goods and services (e.g. narcotics, weapons without a permit, forged documents);
• content that breaches unfair competition law (UCA), including the absence of a legal notice on commercial websites.

Bulk advertising by email is only permitted if the recipients have given their prior consent, the sender is correctly identified and every message contains a simple, free option to unsubscribe (Art. 3 para. 1 let. o UCA). Without consent, only existing customers may be informed about similar products, provided they were able to refuse this when their details were collected.

• No sending to purchased, rented or harvested address lists.
• No forged senders, headers or subject lines.
• No promotion of websites hosted with us through spam sent via third parties (“spamvertising”).
• Newsletters to large lists only via specialised mailing services, not via our servers.
• The hourly sending limits must not be circumvented.

Any action that endangers the security, integrity or availability of systems – ours or those of third parties – is prohibited:

• unauthorised access to third-party systems, password guessing (brute force), port and vulnerability scans without instruction from the system owner;
• denial-of-service attacks, mail bombs, flooding;
• intercepting data traffic (sniffing), forging IP addresses or headers (spoofing);
• operating open mail relays, open DNS resolvers and open proxies;
• passing on access credentials to unauthorised persons.

The customer must report security vulnerabilities or any suspicion of a compromised account to support@hoston.ch without delay.

The following applications are not permitted on web hosting and WordPress hosting packages (this list is not exhaustive; if in doubt, please ask first):

• Crypto miningMining and similar applications that generate continuous load.
• P2P and torrentsP2P networks, torrent trackers and file-sharing services.
• Proxies, VPN, TorAnonymisation services and Tor exit nodes.
• Bots and crawlersMass querying of third-party websites, scrapers.
• Game and chat serversGame servers, IRC servers and bots.
• File storageThird-party backups, archives and media that are not part of the website.

On VPS, resource-intensive applications are permitted within the booked resources, provided they do not endanger our infrastructure or third parties. Crypto mining, Tor exit nodes, open relays and scans are prohibited on VPS as well.

Please send reports about unlawful content, spam, phishing or attacks originating from our servers to abuse@hoston.ch. For us to be able to review them, we need (in accordance with the Swico Code of Conduct):

1. 1your name and contact details (anonymous reports only for depictions of child abuse and offences of comparable gravity);
2. 2the reason why you are affected (e.g. as the rights holder);
3. 3the exact address (URL), or the domain or IP address, and where applicable the full email headers;
4. 4a description of the content and why it is unlawful;
5. 5a statement that your information is correct to the best of your knowledge and belief.

How we proceed

1. 1Review of the reportIncomplete reports can be completed within 2 working days; otherwise we close them.
2. 2Notice and noticeWithin about 2 working days, we forward the report to our customer and ask them to remove the content or to justify it. We only disclose the customer’s name on the order of an authority or a court.
3. 3Notice and takedownIf content is obviously unlawful or dangerous (e.g. phishing, malware), we block it immediately and inform the customer.

In the case of criminal offences, you can also contact the police or the Federal Office for Cybersecurity (NCSC): www.report.ncsc.admin.ch