Terms & conditions

01 About these terms

These terms and conditions (the "Terms") govern your use of the web hosting services supplied by VirexNode Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 16431001, whose registered office is at 128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX ("VirexNode", "we", "us" or "our").

By placing an order, creating an account, or using any part of our services, you confirm that you accept these Terms and that you agree to comply with them. If you do not agree, you must not use our services.

These Terms should be read together with our Privacy Policy, which explains how we handle personal data. Together they form the agreement between you and us.

If you are entering into these Terms on behalf of a company or other organisation, you confirm that you have authority to bind that organisation, and "you" refers to that organisation.

02 Definitions

Account

The hosting account and control panel access we provide to you.

Content

All files, code, databases, media, text and other material you upload to, store on, or transmit through our services.

Plan

The hosting package you have ordered, such as cPanel Essential, cPanel Professional or cPanel Enterprise.

Server

The shared hosting infrastructure on which your Plan is provisioned.

Services

The hosting, storage, bandwidth, control panel, support and related services we supply under your Plan.

Billing Period

The recurring monthly or annual period for which your Plan is charged.

03 Your account

To use our Services you must register an account and provide accurate, current and complete information. You must keep that information up to date, particularly your billing email address, because we use it to send invoices, renewal reminders, maintenance notices and security alerts.

You must be at least 18 years old to open an account.

You are responsible for keeping your account credentials confidential and for all activity that takes place under your account, whether or not you authorised it. You must tell us immediately if you believe your credentials have been compromised.

We may refuse an application, or close an account, where we reasonably believe the information given is false, where an account has been used to breach these Terms previously, or where we are required to do so by law.

04 The services we provide

We provide shared cPanel web hosting from a data centre in the United Kingdom. The specific allowances of your Plan — such as the number of websites, storage, and resource limits — are those shown on our hosting plans page at the time you order, and in your control panel.

Every Plan includes:

• NVMe SSD storage and a cPanel control panel;
• free SSL certificates, issued and renewed automatically;
• daily automated backups with restore options, subject to section 9;
• firewall and network-level DDoS filtering;
• one-click WordPress installation through WP Toolkit; and
• access to our technical support team, subject to section 11.

We may improve, modify or replace elements of the Services from time to time, for example by upgrading server software or changing the version of PHP available. Where a change is likely to materially reduce the Services, we will give you reasonable notice by email.

05 Charges, billing and renewal

Prices and VAT

Prices are shown on our website in pounds sterling and exclude VAT unless stated otherwise. VAT will be added at the applicable rate where it is chargeable.

Introductory pricing

Where we offer a discounted introductory price — for example 50% off the first month — that discount applies only to the first Billing Period. Your Plan then renews automatically at the standard rate published at the time of renewal. The renewal price is shown clearly at checkout and in your order confirmation before you pay.

Automatic renewal

Hosting Plans renew automatically at the end of each Billing Period unless you cancel before the renewal date. We will attempt to take payment using the payment method on file. We send a renewal reminder to your billing email address in advance of each renewal.

Failed payments

If a payment fails, we will retry and notify you. If an invoice remains unpaid, we may suspend the Services. Accounts that remain unpaid may be terminated and the data deleted. We will always attempt to contact you before taking either step.

Price changes

We may change our prices. Any change to the recurring price of your Plan will take effect from your next renewal, and we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email so that you can cancel if you do not wish to continue.

06 Cancellation and refunds

Cancelling your Plan

You may cancel your Plan at any time from your control panel or by contacting us. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current Billing Period, and you will continue to have access to the Services until then. We do not provide pro-rata refunds for part-used Billing Periods except where stated below or where required by law.

Your right to cancel as a consumer

If you are a consumer, you have the right to cancel within 14 days of entering into the contract under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. Because hosting begins immediately, you expressly request that we start supplying the Services during the cancellation period, and you acknowledge that if you then cancel we may charge you a proportionate amount for the Services supplied up to that point.

Money-back guarantee

In addition to your statutory rights, we offer a 14-day money-back guarantee on first orders of a hosting Plan. If you are not satisfied, contact us within 14 days of your first payment and we will refund the hosting charges for that Plan. This guarantee applies once per customer, applies only to hosting charges, and does not cover any third-party services, licences or setup fees purchased through us.

When refunds are not available

We are unable to refund charges where:

• an account has been suspended or terminated for breach of these Terms;
• the request relates to a renewal rather than a first order;
• the charge relates to third-party products, licences or domain services; or
• the 14-day period has already expired.

Data after cancellation

Following cancellation or termination we retain your account data for a short period, currently 14 days, to allow for accidental cancellation and for you to retrieve a copy of your Content. After that period the data is permanently deleted and cannot be recovered. You are responsible for taking your own copy of your Content before you cancel.

07 Fair usage policy

Our shared hosting Plans describe bandwidth and visitors as "unlimited". This means we do not meter them or bill you for overage in normal use. It does not mean the underlying hardware is unlimited. Shared hosting works because customers share the resources of a Server, so this fair usage policy exists to keep performance consistent for everyone on that Server.

Resource allowances

NVMe SSD storage is the only resource individually allocated to your Plan. CPU cores and memory (RAM) are provided on a fair-use basis: they come from resources shared across the Server rather than being dedicated to your account, and the figures below are the most your account can use at any one time, not capacity reserved for you. Your allowances and current usage are always visible in your cPanel control panel. Your Plan's allowances are:

Everything else — running processes, I/O and bandwidth — is also drawn from resources shared across the Server, without fixed per-Plan allowances. This is what lets us offer bandwidth and visitor numbers as effectively unlimited. Brief spikes in usage are normal and expected — a burst of traffic, a backup running, or a plugin update will not cause a problem. This policy is concerned with sustained usage that affects other customers.

What counts as excessive use

Usage may be considered excessive where an account:

• consumes a disproportionate share of the Server's shared CPU, memory or I/O capacity for sustained periods rather than in short bursts;
• uses a disproportionate share of network bandwidth compared with other accounts on the same Plan, which we may cap or ask you to move to a custom plan to resolve;
• runs processes that measurably degrade performance for other customers on the same Server;
• uses storage substantially for file archiving, media libraries, backups or file distribution rather than for an operating website;
• runs long-running scripts, cron jobs at excessive frequency, cryptocurrency mining, or persistent background processes;
• generates very large numbers of small files, database queries or connections that place disproportionate load on the Server; or
• has outgrown shared hosting because the website has genuinely become popular.

How we handle excessive use

Our aim is always to resolve resource issues with you rather than to interrupt your website. Ordinarily we will:

1. Contact you by email with details of the usage we have seen, and where possible identify what is causing it — often a specific plugin, an unoptimised query, a bot crawling the site, or a missing cache.
2. Offer help to reduce the load, such as suggesting caching, optimisation, or blocking abusive traffic. There is no charge for this advice.
3. Recommend an upgrade to a higher-tier Plan or a custom solution if the usage is legitimate and simply exceeds what your current Plan provides. We will give you a clear quote and a reasonable period to decide.
4. Apply additional limits only where usage continues to affect other customers and the issue has not been resolved. This may mean throttling the account's resource or bandwidth usage, which can make the website slower, or temporarily suspending a specific process or script.
5. Suspend the account as a last resort, where usage is severely affecting the stability of the Server and we have been unable to reach agreement with you.

Where usage poses an immediate and serious risk to the stability or security of the Server or to other customers, we may act first and notify you immediately afterwards. We will always tell you what we did and why.

Storage and backups

Storage is provided for the operation of your websites. It is not intended for general file storage, media archives, or as a backup destination for systems hosted elsewhere. We may ask you to remove material stored for those purposes, or to move to a Plan or solution that is designed for it.

08 Acceptable use policy

You are responsible for everything hosted on or transmitted through your Account. You must not use the Services to store, publish, transmit or link to any material, or to carry out any activity, that:

• is unlawful under the laws of England and Wales, or breaches any applicable regulation;
• infringes the intellectual property rights of any person, including unlicensed software, media or fonts;
• is defamatory, harassing, threatening, or incites violence or hatred;
• constitutes or facilitates child sexual abuse material, which we report to the relevant authorities without notice;
• is used for phishing, fraud, identity theft, or the distribution of malware, viruses or ransomware;
• involves sending unsolicited bulk messages, or hosting sites advertised by such messages, wherever they are sent from;
• involves port scanning, penetration testing, denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks or unauthorised access attempts against any system, whether ours or a third party's;
• involves cryptocurrency mining, distributed computing, or proxy, VPN or tunnelling services;
• deliberately circumvents the resource limits or security controls described in these Terms; or
• places our infrastructure, our IP address reputation, or our other customers at material risk.

We do not routinely monitor the content of customer websites, and we are not obliged to. Where we are made aware of material that breaches this policy, or are required to act by a court, regulator or law enforcement, we will investigate and take proportionate action.

If you become aware of a breach of this policy on our network, please report it to [email protected].

09 Backups and your content

We take automated daily backups of hosting accounts and retain them on a rolling basis. You can restore from these backups yourself through your control panel, and our support team can assist.

You retain all ownership of your Content. You grant us only the limited licence necessary to host, store, transmit, back up and display that Content in order to provide the Services to you.

You are responsible for ensuring you have the rights to all Content you upload, and for complying with any laws that apply to it — including data protection law where your website collects personal data from your own visitors.

10 Uptime commitment

We aim to provide 99.9% network and server uptime in each calendar month, measured across our hosting infrastructure and excluding the circumstances listed below.

If we fall short of 99.9% in a calendar month, you may request a service credit against your next invoice:

Service credits are the sole remedy for failing to meet this commitment. To claim, contact us within 30 days of the end of the affected month, giving the dates and times of the downtime you observed. Credits are applied to future invoices and are not payable in cash.

This commitment does not apply to downtime caused by:

• scheduled or emergency maintenance for which we gave notice;
• faults in your own Content, code, plugins, themes or database;
• resource limits being reached, as described in section 7;
• suspension under sections 8 or 13;
• your domain name, DNS or a third-party service outside our network; or
• events outside our control, as described in section 21.

11 Support

We provide technical support every day of the week, via our ticketing system, for issues relating to the hosting platform — server configuration, control panel access, SSL, performance, backups and connectivity. We prioritise urgent issues affecting the availability of your website, and aim to respond as quickly as we can, though response times may be longer outside normal business hours or during busy periods.

Support does not extend to development work on your website, such as building or debugging custom code, designing themes, or fixing third-party plugins. Where we can point you in the right direction we will, but we are not obliged to resolve issues that originate in your own Content.

We ask that you treat our team courteously. We may decline to continue a conversation, and in serious cases suspend an account, where a person is abusive towards our staff.

12 Migrations

We can help move an existing website to VirexNode from another provider. Migration assistance is offered on a best-efforts basis and depends on the access, control panel and technologies used by your current host. Migrations are not automatically included or free of charge — contact us before you order and we will confirm what's involved and whether a fee applies.

We will agree a migration window with you and take reasonable care throughout, but we cannot guarantee that every site can be migrated without change, or that there will be no downtime during DNS propagation. We recommend you keep your existing hosting active until the migration is confirmed complete and you are satisfied.

13 Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate your Services where:

• an invoice remains unpaid after we have notified you;
• you materially breach these Terms, including the acceptable use policy;
• your usage poses an immediate risk to the Server, our network, or other customers;
• we are required to do so by law, a court order, or a regulator; or
• you have provided false information in connection with your account.

Except where the issue is urgent or where we are legally prevented from doing so, we will notify you first and give you a reasonable opportunity to put things right.

You may terminate at any time in accordance with section 6. On termination, your right to use the Services ends immediately, and your data is handled as described in section 6.

We may also withdraw a service entirely by giving you at least 30 days' written notice, in which case we will refund any charges you have paid for periods after the service ends.

14 Security and your responsibilities

We maintain firewalls, network-level DDoS filtering, patching and monitoring at the platform level. Security of your own website, however, is a shared responsibility.

You are responsible for:

• keeping applications, themes and plugins updated;
• using strong, unique passwords and enabling any additional authentication we offer;
• removing software you no longer use;
• the security of any code you or your developers write; and
• notifying us promptly if you suspect your account has been compromised.

Where an account is compromised and is being used to attack others, send spam, or distribute malware, we may suspend it immediately to protect our network and other customers, and will work with you to clean and restore it.

15 Third-party software

The Services include third-party software such as cPanel and WP Toolkit. Your use of that software is subject to the relevant vendor's own licence terms. We are not responsible for third-party software defects, changes to its functionality, or its withdrawal by the vendor, although we will always try to give you notice of material changes.

Any applications you install, and any plugins or themes you add, are your responsibility to license, configure, maintain and secure.

16 Intellectual property

All intellectual property rights in our website, branding, documentation and platform remain ours or our licensors'. Nothing in these Terms transfers any of those rights to you.

All intellectual property rights in your Content remain yours. If you believe material hosted on our network infringes your rights, contact us at [email protected] with details of the material and of your rights, and we will investigate.

17 Limitation of 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 or excluded.

Subject to that, and to the extent permitted by law, we are not liable to you for:

• loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill or anticipated savings;
• loss or corruption of data, except where caused by our negligence and where you have complied with section 9;
• any indirect or consequential loss; or
• losses arising from your own Content, code, or third-party software.

Our total liability to you in connection with the Services in any twelve-month period is limited to the total charges you paid us for the Services in that period.

If you are a business, we exclude all warranties, conditions and terms implied by statute or common law to the fullest extent permitted. If you are a consumer, we supply the Services with reasonable care and skill as required by the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and this section does not affect your statutory rights.

18 Indemnity

If you are a business, you agree to indemnify us against any claims, losses, damages and reasonable legal costs arising from your Content, your use of the Services in breach of these Terms, or any claim that your Content infringes a third party's rights.

19 Privacy and data protection

We process personal data in accordance with our Privacy Policy and with UK data protection law, including the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.

Where your website collects or stores personal data about your own visitors, customers or staff, you are the data controller for that data and we act as a data processor on your behalf. In that role we process that data only to provide the Services, only on your instructions, and we apply appropriate technical and organisational security measures. Section 11 of our Privacy Policy sets out these arrangements in more detail.

You must ensure you have a lawful basis for the personal data you place on our servers, and that you have your own privacy notice in place where required.

20 Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms from time to time, for example to reflect changes in the law, in our services, or in how we operate. The current version is always published on this page with the date it was last updated.

Where a change materially affects your rights or obligations, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before it takes effect. If you do not accept the change, you may cancel before it applies and we will refund any charges covering the period after cancellation.

21 Events outside our control

We are not liable for failure or delay in performing our obligations where that failure or delay results from events outside our reasonable control. This includes power or network failures affecting the wider internet, failures of upstream providers or data centres, cyber-attacks of exceptional scale, fire, flood, severe weather, industrial action, epidemics, acts of terrorism, or the acts of government.

Where such an event occurs, we will notify you and take reasonable steps to minimise its effect. If it continues for more than 30 days, either of us may terminate the affected Services and we will refund charges covering the period after termination.

22 General

Assignment

You may not transfer your rights or obligations under these Terms without our written consent. We may transfer ours to another business, provided this does not reduce your rights.

Entire agreement

These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy and your order confirmation, form the entire agreement between us and replace any earlier discussions or representations.

Severability

If any provision is found to be unlawful or unenforceable, the rest of these Terms continue in force.

No waiver

If we delay in enforcing any part of these Terms, that does not prevent us from enforcing it later.

Third parties

No one other than you and us has any right to enforce these Terms.

23 Complaints

If something has gone wrong, please tell us. Email [email protected] with the word "Complaint" in the subject line, or write to us at the address in section 25. We aim to acknowledge complaints within two working days and to resolve them within 14 days, telling you if we need longer.

24 Governing law

These Terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom, you may also bring proceedings in the courts of the country in which you live.

25 Contact us

You can reach us in any of the following ways:

Email

[email protected]

Telephone

0330 229 6555

Post

VirexNode Ltd, 128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom

Company registration

Registered in England and Wales, company number 16431001