5 Weird TOS Violations You Could Be Accused Of

Web hosts tend to put fairly predictable restrictions on clients.

Don’t spam, don’t post pirated content and be realistic about the limitations of your ‘unlimited’ account.

Unfortunately, some customers unwittingly get caught out under some more obscure rules.

What Is a TOS?

The TOS is the Terms of Service document: the rulebook that governs your hosting account.

The TOS is normally written by a lawyer and will give the company leeway to close accounts for a wide range of reasons.

Sometimes, hosts pick and choose violations in order to rid themselves of problem clients.

Here are five TOS violations you might be unwittingly caught under.

1. Contests and Competitions

Many hosts prohibit competitions, particularly those backed by a cash prize. Sometimes this comes under the very broad TOS term of ‘gambling’ or ‘lottery’ restriction.

Small contests probably won’t matter, but if your hosts needs an excuse to give you the boot, your contest might be the final straw.

2. Image Hotlinking

Hosts don’t want you creating your own Photobucket clone on an ‘unlimited’ shared hosting account. So don’t offer buttons and banners.

Thankfully, web rings and banner ads are becoming less popular anyway, but always try to convince people to download content rather than linking to it.

3. Personal Backups

Using your hosting account for backups is a grey area. Some hosts are OK with you using a webdisk type service, whereas others don’t like you posting backups on their servers at all.

Hosts, as a service, are more interested in hosting sites than files. That’s because web sites take up little hard drive space but use a decent amount of bandwidth; backups are the exact opposite. It’s not really what hosting plans are designed for.

4. Mailing Lists

Hosts often don’t want to debate spam. They just prevent all lists and sidestep the argument completely.

If you want a mailing list, you’re better off using a service like MailChimp than trying to host your own.

5. <Insert Random Clause>

Most hosts have a clause in their TOS that allows them to change the policy at any time without any notice.

What is allowed today might not be tomorrow.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation launched a service, TOS Back, to track TOS documents. They found that terms are changed much more often than people realise.

How to Avoid a TOS Problem

If your host wants to cut your account, they can and will. They might also force you to upgrade.

There’s no sure-fire way to avoid this.

Choosing the right capacity plan for your needs is the best way to ensure you stay within your limits and avoid being flagged up as a risky customer.