Fair Usage Policy

To provide the best experience to all of our customers, we exercise a lenient stance to usage in all of our packages. In packages which offer unlimited throughput and bandwidth, we leave the onus on you to decide what you think is acceptable. Sometimes there comes a point when we have to step in however so this policy describes how we approach high usage scenarios.

Warranties and Claims

By connecting to Grey Method and any associated platforms, you agree to hold Grey Method harmless in the event of any legal claim regarding our services.

We pledge to ensure reasonable uptime of at least 99.5% availability over the period of one year and will re-imburse you for any failure to meet this uptime up to and in excess of your monthly subscription cost, at a maximum of three months.

Acceptable Use

Our web hosting packages limit data consumption by restricting the overall throughput rather than monthly data transfer, this reduces headaches for both us and you as the service consumer. Our gold package does not have this throughput restriction, which means that shared hosting users which have high monthly data consumption could adversely affect other users. We do our best to analyze the usage of individual users and adapt our infrastructure instead of restrict users however if we feel that you are abusing the service we will inform you and in the failure to resolve these complications in due time, may restrict or terminate your account.

If you believe your usage patterns to be in excess of any hosting plan currently provided by us then please contact us to discuss a custom plan using the Contact Us link at the footer of the page.

Our Definition of Reasonable Use

Many service providers are ambiguous in their definition of reasonable usage, we hope to make it clear what we define as reasonable use hence the recommended usage figures available with all hosting plans. We understand that in the modern age, your hosting needs may include data heavy media consumption of content such as video, audio and the hosting of large application files and pictures.

We ask that you consider the recommended figures (users/visitors) and adapt your usage to reflect this. As an example, your recommended users figure is up to 100 users, which suggests that over a period of one month - your site will be used on a semi-regular basis by up to 100 users. These users will likely consume content which is data heavy, which may include high definition video content or large files and images. An average user would likely use roughly 500MBytes of data throughout a month, which leads us to consider anything above 50GB/month excessive.

We do understand that some users may consume significantly more data than others, and know that these figures will always fluctuate - so we look at things realistically and suggest that in this case if you use on average more than double the realistic amount a month over an extended period of time (for example, 100GB/month for multiple months), then we will contact you and discuss potentially scalability options or ask that you reduce your usage.

For your own reference, multiply the recommended users figure by 500MBytes and try and maintain a constant usage of less than double this figure. We are lenient and will not likely have any qualms with excessive usage if it is not sustained.

Illicit Activity

When using our hosting packages, you must respect the laws and restrictions imposed by your legal territory and ours, the United Kingdom. In the case that you are found to be operating your site, any agents, scripts/code or content not in accordance to UK laws and your own - we will not hesitate to contact the local authorities and terminate your account. It should be noted that we reserve the right to terminate your service without data retention if we find content and services that we feel breaks any such laws governing the use of that content.

You as a service consumer are entirely and exclusively responsible for any damages, implications and unlawful conduct that derives from your access to our hosting services. Further from this, you are responsible for maintaining security of access to your account management panel and we will not be held responsible for any failure outside the scope of our system in your ability to do so.

You agree wholeheartedly by purchasing our packages and using our services that you will not use our hosting services to do any of the following:

Denial of Service Attacks
Exploit Polling and Port Scanning
Data Mining and Web Scraping
Host Malware, Spyware or any other PUP
Index Warez, Torrents and Unlicenced Copyrighted Content
Gore, Extremist and Cult Content and/or related Propaganda
Revenge Pornography, Child Pornography and other obscene material
Host unlicenced copyrighted material

Following these restrictions, you understand that Grey Method reserves the right to restrict your use of our services if we suspect you to be engaging in any illicit activities, or have been contacted by a legal authority with matters pertaining to your use of the service.

Resource Allocation

Your proposed limits are provided to maintain fair distribution of running costs and licencing, whilst making a guarantee that you will get your proposed limits. Our storage is stored on Provisioned SSD storage space, speeds scale with size so that 15GB has greater available IOPs than 2GB. CPU performance is percentage of a single server core, so that 1x is 10% of a typical modern Intel Xeon core (Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 @2.4GHz).

You are guaranteed the bandwidth and space you have been allocated, we do not overprovision our servers. The only exception to this is bandwidth utilization, where the max theoretical bandwidth is defined in your subscription level (10Mbps for Bronze, etc.) is provided so long as you do not abuse the service outside what's defined as reasonable use. Reasonable use describes usage of the service that would be typical for an individual or organization using their site for commercial or personal purposes.

An example of reasonable use abused is 100% utilization of your 10Mbps allocation if you are on a bronze package, as this signifies that your usage does not correlate with the sensible recommended user count usage, counting 10Mbps sustained bandwidth usage as over 300GB of total bandwidth consumed in a month. This example would be an example of sensible usage, with on average 400 visits a day on a Bronze package each pulling anywhere from 500-2500MB per day in total, at time reaching speeds of 10Mbps but over time utilizing less than 100GB in a given month.

Sensitive Data

Our services make it possible for you to store, and access information that could relate to a person(s) which should otherwise not be collected based on the laws of your state. You must not use these services to store information forbidden by law, as the security and availability of this data is not managed by us, but rather yourself as the consumer of an explicity unmanaged service with only support available.

As a tenant on shared infrastructure, every effort has been made to isolate you and your services from other tenants which also share this infrastructure. As such, you must not use your resources either through exploits and other forms of hacking to attempt to gain unauthorized access to another tenants information, doing so will result in legal action. The servers and their content are located in Frankfurt, Germany with the principal company being us (Grey Method) operating under UK jurisdiction.