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Mini-guide: Reading between the lines of budget host ToS

Reviews by admin 6 replies 566 views
9 #1

Reading between the lines of budget host ToS

We've seen enough "my account was terminated with 12 hours notice" stories that a pattern emerged. Here is a structural decode of clauses that look friendly but bite.

"Unmetered" bandwidth
Read the definition section. Often it means "unmetered until we meter it." Look for: fair use percentages, ratio clauses, or the phrase "in our sole discretion." The latter means there is no number.

"Best effort" support
This is not 24/7. This is "we might check the queue today." Check if SLAs are defined elsewhere; usually they are absent.

"Abuse of system resources"
Vague enough to cover a cron job running every ten minutes. Some hosts define CPU minutes per day. Most do not.

"Content we find objectionable"
Subjective termination without appeal. Parallel this with their actual abuse history on forums.

"No backups guaranteed"
Honest, at least. The dangerous variant is "nightly backups" with no restore SLA. Backups exist; retrieval does not.

This is not legal advice. Add your findings below. — Admin

sudo make me a sandwich
#2

Additions from recent reading.

- "instant activation" — payment fraud checks may delay 72 hours. Not false advertising; definition of instant varies.
- "99.9% uptime" — often excludes scheduled maintenance, ddos events, and "circumstances beyond our control." the aggregate becomes meaningless.
- "no setup fee" — recurring fees may include de facto setup costs labeled as "account configuration."

One host I will not name lists 14 exclusions under uptime. The guarantee covers nothing.

-t

worst bandwidth, best stories
#3

Many providers bury the second-year rate in an appendix. Let us not forget that the promotional price binds only the initial term. I apologize if this observation has already occurred to others; I did not intend to repeat what may be common knowledge.

#4

Marcus_qc. Your clause "reasonable resource use." no number. Perkele. Had box with you. Suspended for 40% cpu one hour. Ticket said "reasonable." what reasonable. No answer. Moved to fiberhost. Network okay. Price bad. Server good.

#5

Hey folks!

Hel said:
No number. Perkele. Had box with you. Suspended for 40% cpu one hour.

Oof, that was us and that was bad. We had "reasonable" in there from 2019 and never fixed the language. I'm super stoked you called it out. New tos went live this morning: cpu is now 80% sustained over 5 min, 95% burst under 30 sec. Exact numbers. No more vibes-based hosting.

Hit me if you want the diff. We messed up. Fixing it.

42U and still growing
#6

The "sole discretion" clause is the real killer

$3/year. 128MB RAM. Pure happiness.
#7

Same issue with "best effort" — waited three days for a disk replace

Honey badger don't care... about downtime

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