Terms of Service

The terms set out below constitute the contractual agreement between the operator of the OffshorePress hosting service and the subscriber to that service. The operator publishes the document in plain editorial English in preference to the boilerplate register that the commercial-hosting industry has gravitated toward, on the view that an obligation a subscriber is asked to accept should be expressed in language a subscriber can understand. The substantive content of the document — the obligations and the limitations of liability — is no less binding for the editorial register in which it is written.

1. Definitions

For the purposes of this document, the following definitions apply.

The “operator” means the legal entity identified in the on-page metadata of every legal page on the OffshorePress site, which entity holds the contractual relationship with the subscriber and operates the underlying infrastructure. The legal-entity name is rendered as a placeholder in the present version of this document pending the conclusion of the operator’s counsel-led entity formation; the placeholder will be replaced with the registered entity name and jurisdiction when the formation completes.

The “subscriber” means the natural or legal person who accepts these terms by creating an account on the OffshorePress site, by submitting an order for a hosting plan, or by paying an invoice issued under a hosting plan, whichever occurs first.

The “service” means the hosting service the operator provides — virtual private servers, dedicated machines, and email hosting — as described on the relevant product pages on the OffshorePress site, together with the operator’s customer-service and incident-response activities in support of those products.

The “infrastructure” means the physical and logical computing resources that the operator uses to deliver the service, including the operator’s servers, the carrier circuits the operator leases, the data-centre facilities the operator occupies, and the software stacks the operator runs on those resources.

The “subscriber content” means the data that the subscriber stores on the infrastructure, the workloads the subscriber runs on the infrastructure, and the network traffic the subscriber generates through the infrastructure. The operator does not assert any ownership interest in subscriber content.

The “acceptable use policy” means the policy document published at /legal/aup, which forms an integral part of these terms and which the subscriber accepts by accepting these terms.

The “service-level agreement” means the agreement document published at /legal/sla, which forms an integral part of these terms and which sets out the operator’s uptime and support commitments.

The “refund policy” means the policy document published at /legal/refund, which forms an integral part of these terms and which sets out the conditions under which the operator will refund a subscriber’s payment.

The “privacy policy” means the policy document published at /legal/privacy, which forms an integral part of these terms and which sets out the operator’s data-protection practices in relation to subscriber data.

2. Scope

These terms apply to the relationship between the operator and the subscriber in connection with the service. They do not apply to the relationship between the operator and any party other than the subscriber; in particular, the operator’s relationship with the carriers and data-centre providers that supply the underlying infrastructure is governed by separate contracts to which the subscriber is not a party.

These terms supersede any prior version of the operator’s terms of service that may have been published on the OffshorePress site. Where the operator publishes a revised version of these terms, the revised version takes effect on the effective-from date stated in its frontmatter; the operator will, where reasonably practicable, give notice of the revision to existing subscribers by email at least thirty days before the effective-from date. Continued use of the service after the effective-from date constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

These terms are the complete statement of the contractual relationship between the operator and the subscriber. No verbal representation made by the operator’s staff, no marketing copy published on the OffshorePress site, and no statement made by the operator on a third-party publication or social-media platform amends or supersedes these terms.

3. Account terms

The subscriber’s account on the OffshorePress site is the operator’s primary record of the subscriber’s identity for the purposes of the service. The operator’s anonymous-signup posture is set out on the relevant product pages: the operator does not require the subscriber to provide a legal name, a government-issued identifier, or any other piece of know-your-customer information as a precondition for the establishment of the account. The subscriber is responsible for the security of the account credentials and for the security of any cryptographic keys (PGP, SSH, two-factor) the subscriber has registered against the account.

Each account is associated with a single contact email address. The operator uses the contact email address to send invoices, service notices, and incident communications. The subscriber is responsible for keeping the contact email address current; an incident notice that the operator sends to a stale contact email address is, for the purposes of these terms, deemed to have been received by the subscriber.

The subscriber may close the account at any time by notice to the contact form at /contact. Closure of the account terminates the operator’s obligations to provide the service from the effective date of the closure; pending refunds, if any, are processed under the refund policy. The operator may, in its discretion, retain a minimal record of the closed account (the email address, the closure date, and any outstanding balance) for the period required by the operator’s tax and audit obligations under the law of the operator’s jurisdiction.

A subscriber may not transfer the account to another party without the operator’s express prior written consent, which the operator will not unreasonably withhold but which the operator may condition on the operator’s verification that the transferee has accepted these terms.

4. Acceptable use

The subscriber accepts the acceptable use policy at /legal/aup as an integral part of these terms. The substantive content of the acceptable use policy is enumerated there; in summary, the policy prohibits the subscriber from using the infrastructure to host child sexual abuse material, terrorism material, active malware command-and-control infrastructure, phishing infrastructure, fraud or credential-market infrastructure, or non-consensual imagery. The acceptable use policy further sets out the operator’s response process for credible abuse complaints and the repeat-offender threshold beyond which the operator will terminate a subscriber’s account.

The operator’s stance on intellectual-property complaints is set out in the acceptable use policy and is summarised here for clarity: the operator does not process notices in the format of the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act, on the basis that the operator’s filing jurisdiction is outside the United States and that the operator’s contractual relationship with subscribers does not include a representation that the operator will respond to extraterritorial intellectual-property notices on a notice-and-takedown basis. Substantive intellectual-property complaints are evaluated on their merits under the operator’s acceptable use policy and under the law of the operator’s filing jurisdiction; routine intellectual-property notices that do not establish a substantive claim under that law are not actioned.

5. Payment and billing cycle

The operator publishes its prices on the relevant product pages. The price quoted on the product page is the price the subscriber pays per billing cycle for the duration of the cycle; the operator does not impose surcharges, set-up fees, or auxiliary charges that are not disclosed on the product page at the time of order. The billing cycle is monthly unless a different cycle is offered on the product page or agreed by the operator in correspondence with the subscriber; quarterly and annual cycles, where offered, attract no separate discount in the present version of the catalogue.

The operator accepts payment in the methods enumerated on the /payments page and in the relevant product pages: Monero, Bitcoin over the Lightning Network, on-chain Bitcoin, and cash sent by post. The operator does not accept credit cards, bank transfers, or any third-party fiat-payment processor. The operator’s rationale for the omission of fiat-payment infrastructure is set out on the /payments page.

Invoices are issued at the start of each billing cycle and are due immediately. An invoice that remains unpaid after seven days from issuance puts the associated service into a suspension grace period; an invoice that remains unpaid after fourteen days from issuance results in suspension of the service. An invoice that remains unpaid after thirty days from issuance results in termination of the service and irreversible deletion of the associated subscriber content. The operator will, where reasonably practicable, send escalating notices to the subscriber’s contact email address at the seven-day, fourteen-day, twenty-one-day, and thirty-day marks; the obligation to pay the invoice is not contingent on the subscriber’s receipt of any of those notices.

Cryptocurrency invoices are denominated in United States dollars and quoted in the relevant cryptocurrency at the spot rate the operator reads from its self-hosted price oracle at the time of invoice issuance. A payment received in the correct cryptocurrency in the correct amount within the invoice’s quoted-rate validity window (typically twenty minutes) is settled at the quoted rate. A payment received outside the validity window is settled at the operator’s spot rate at the time of receipt; an underpayment is held against the subscriber’s account as a credit and the invoice remains open until the balance is settled.

6. Refunds

The operator’s refund posture is set out in the refund policy at /legal/refund and is summarised here. The operator offers a satisfaction guarantee for the first invoice paid under any new hosting plan: a subscriber who is dissatisfied with the service for any reason may request a full refund of the first invoice within seven calendar days of the invoice issuance, and the operator will process the refund within ten business days through the original payment method or — for crypto payments where the destination wallet is no longer accessible — through an alternative crypto wallet the subscriber nominates. The cash-mail-in payment method is not eligible for the satisfaction-guarantee refund, on the operational ground that the operator does not retain the cash and the chain of custody from the operator’s mail-handling agent through to the operator’s deposit account does not support a refund-in-kind.

Refunds for invoices subsequent to the first are processed at the operator’s discretion under the conditions set out in the refund policy.

7. Service-level commitments

The operator’s uptime and support-response commitments are set out in the service-level agreement at /legal/sla. The agreement provides for service credits in the event the operator misses an uptime target and sets out the severity ladder under which the operator’s support team triages incoming tickets. The service-level agreement is the operator’s complete commitment in respect of the availability of the service; the operator does not make additional availability representations outside the agreement.

8. Suspension and termination

The operator may suspend the subscriber’s service in the following circumstances.

Where the subscriber is in arrears on a payable invoice beyond the grace period set out in section 5.

Where the operator has reasonable grounds to believe that the subscriber is using the service in a manner that contravenes the acceptable use policy and the operator considers that an immediate suspension is necessary to limit harm to a third party.

Where the operator is required to suspend the service by an order of a court of competent jurisdiction in the operator’s filing jurisdiction.

A suspension under any of the above grounds is, where reasonably practicable, accompanied by a notice to the subscriber’s contact email address setting out the ground for the suspension and the conditions under which the operator will lift the suspension. A suspension that the operator imposes under the second ground (suspected acceptable-use breach) is reviewed within five business days; if the review concludes that the suspected breach is unsupported, the operator lifts the suspension and credits the subscriber’s account for the period of the suspension.

The operator may terminate the subscriber’s service in the following circumstances.

Where the subscriber is in arrears on a payable invoice beyond the termination threshold set out in section 5.

Where the subscriber is found, on review, to have committed a breach of the acceptable use policy that the policy treats as a terminating breach.

Where the operator is required to terminate the service by an order of a court of competent jurisdiction in the operator’s filing jurisdiction.

Where the operator decides, in its discretion, to discontinue the service in whole or in a category that includes the subscriber’s plan, in which case the operator gives the subscriber not less than ninety days’ notice and refunds the unused balance of any paid-up invoice on a pro-rata basis.

Termination of the service results in the irreversible deletion of the subscriber content from the infrastructure within the operator’s standard retention window for terminated services. The subscriber is responsible for taking a copy of the subscriber content before the termination effective date.

9. Limitation of liability

To the extent permitted by the law of the operator’s filing jurisdiction, the operator’s aggregate liability to the subscriber under or in connection with these terms is limited to the amount the subscriber has paid the operator in the twelve months immediately preceding the event giving rise to the liability. The operator does not exclude or limit liability for fraud, for fraudulent misrepresentation, for personal injury or death caused by the operator’s negligence, or for any other liability that the law of the operator’s filing jurisdiction does not permit to be limited.

The operator does not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, that defects in the service will be corrected, or that the service will meet the subscriber’s specific requirements. The service-level agreement at /legal/sla is the operator’s only availability commitment and the only basis on which the operator pays compensation for missed availability.

10. Dispute resolution

The parties undertake to attempt to resolve any dispute arising under or in connection with these terms by direct negotiation in the first instance, conducted in good faith over a period of not less than thirty days from the date one party gives written notice of the dispute to the other.

Where direct negotiation does not resolve the dispute within the negotiation window, the dispute is referred to binding arbitration under the rules of an institutional arbitral provider in the seat the operator’s counsel will identify in the post-launch revision of this document. The seat-of-arbitration question is left as an open placeholder in the present version of this document; the operator’s counsel is expected to identify the seat in connection with the operator’s entity formation and the seat will be inserted into the document at the point counsel review concludes.

The operator and the subscriber expressly waive the right to bring a dispute under these terms before a court of any jurisdiction other than (a) for the limited purpose of enforcing an arbitral award or (b) for the limited purpose of obtaining interim or conservatory relief in support of the arbitration.

11. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the operator’s filing jurisdiction, which is rendered as a placeholder in the present version of this document pending the conclusion of the operator’s counsel-led entity formation. The placeholder will be replaced with the substantive jurisdiction when the formation completes; subscribers who entered into these terms before the placeholder was replaced will be given thirty days’ notice of the substantive jurisdiction and an opportunity to terminate the service without penalty if the substantive jurisdiction is one with which the subscriber cannot proceed.

12. Force majeure

Neither party is liable for any failure to perform an obligation under these terms to the extent the failure is caused by a circumstance beyond the party’s reasonable control, including (without limitation) acts of war, acts of civil authority, natural disasters, pandemic public-health emergencies, large-scale failure of public telecommunications infrastructure, and large-scale failure of the electricity grid serving the operator’s data-centre facility. A party affected by a force-majeure circumstance gives the other party prompt notice of the circumstance and uses reasonable efforts to mitigate the impact of the circumstance on the affected party’s performance.

13. Notices

Notices the operator gives the subscriber under these terms are delivered to the subscriber’s contact email address. Notices the subscriber gives the operator under these terms are delivered to the contact form at /contact. A notice is deemed received on the business day after dispatch unless the sender receives an automated bounce response, in which case the notice is deemed not to have been delivered.

14. Entire agreement

These terms, together with the acceptable use policy, the privacy policy, the service-level agreement, and the refund policy, constitute the entire agreement between the operator and the subscriber in respect of the service. Any prior agreement, arrangement, or understanding between the parties in respect of the service is superseded by these terms.

15. Severability

If any provision of these terms is held by an arbitral tribunal or by a court of competent jurisdiction to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions of these terms continue in full force and effect, and the invalid or unenforceable provision is replaced by a provision that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, gives effect to the parties’ original intention as expressed in the original provision.