Terms of service

1. The service

SnowServers provides managed hosting on infrastructure we operate: Minecraft game servers, and application hosting for Discord bots. Plans, resource limits and prices are described on the Minecraft plans and Discord bot pages and form part of these terms.

2. Your account

You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for everything that happens on your server, including the conduct of players you invite and any plugins, mods or code you install. Do not share your account. If you believe someone else has access to it, tell us immediately.

You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account, and old enough to enter a contract in your jurisdiction. If you are not, a parent or guardian must agree to these terms and hold the account on your behalf.

3. One account per person, one free server per account

The free plan is limited to one server per account, and this is enforced when the server is created. Creating additional accounts to hold more than one free server is a breach of these terms, and we may suspend every account involved, including any paid ones.

We are not trying to catch out families sharing a house. We are trying to stop one person taking twenty free servers. If you have a genuine reason to need more than one, ask us first and we will usually say yes.

4. Acceptable use

Use of the service is subject to our acceptable use policy, which forms part of these terms. Breaching it may result in suspension or termination.

5. Fair use of resources

Your plan buys a stated amount of memory, CPU and storage, and you are free to use all of it. What you may not do is run workloads that are not the service you bought: cryptocurrency mining, distributed computing projects, media transcoding farms, torrent or seedbox activity, open proxies or VPN exits, or anything whose purpose is to consume as much capacity as it can get.

You also may not resell, sublet or otherwise provide the service to third parties as your own hosting product without a written agreement with us.

Where a server degrades the machine for other customers, we may throttle or suspend it. We will tell you why, and we would far rather move you to a plan that fits than switch you off.

6. Payment

Paid plans are billed in advance, monthly or annually, through Stripe. Prices are in USD and exclude any tax that may apply. We may change prices with reasonable notice; changes do not affect a period you have already paid for.

If a payment fails we will retry and contact you. A server that remains unpaid is suspended, and after the retention window in clause 8 its data is deleted.

7. Chargebacks

If you have a billing problem, contact us. We will refund a genuine mistake without argument.

Raising a chargeback with your bank instead of contacting us costs us the disputed amount plus a fee regardless of who is right. Doing so will result in immediate suspension of all your services and permanent refusal of future service, and we may pursue the outstanding balance. This clause does not apply to genuine fraud on your card, which you should absolutely dispute.

8. Cancellation, refunds and data retention

You may cancel at any time. Your server continues to the end of the period you have paid for, then suspends. Cancelling does not refund the remainder of a period already paid.

After suspension, for any reason, we retain your server data for 14 days so you can retrieve it, and then delete it permanently. Copies may persist in encrypted backups for a short period after that before ageing out. Do not rely on this window: take your own copy before you cancel.

If the service is materially broken through our fault and we cannot fix it, we will refund the affected period.

9. Availability

We aim for high availability but do not offer a contractual uptime guarantee with penalties, and we will not pretend otherwise. Maintenance, hardware failure and upstream network problems can cause downtime. Where planned maintenance is likely to be disruptive, we will give notice.

The service is provided as is. To the extent permitted by law we make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose.

10. Backups

Backup allowances are listed on each plan. Backups are a convenience, not a guarantee, and you remain responsible for keeping your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose.

To be straight with you about where they are kept: your daily backups sit on the same machine as the server they came from. That protects you from a griefed spawn, a bad plugin or a mistake of your own, and it does not protect you from that machine failing. A second copy held somewhere else is not running yet; we will say so here when it is. Until then, download anything you cannot afford to lose.

11. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate a server that breaches the acceptable use policy, that is not paid for, or that threatens the stability or security of the platform. Where circumstances allow we will contact you first and give you a chance to fix it.

We may act immediately and without notice where content is illegal, where the service is being used to attack others, or where delay would put the platform or other customers at risk. Where we do that, we will tell you what happened afterwards.

12. Your content

Your worlds, files and code remain yours. You grant us only the limited permission needed to run the service: to store, transmit and back up that data on your behalf. We do not read your files except where you ask us to for support, or where we are investigating a specific abuse report or legal obligation.

You confirm you have the right to host what you upload, including any plugins, mods or assets subject to someone else's licence.

13. Liability

To the extent permitted by law, our total liability is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months preceding a claim. We are not liable for lost profits, lost world data, or indirect or consequential losses. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for death, personal injury or fraud.

14. Indemnity

You agree to cover us against claims, damages and reasonable costs arising from your use of the service in breach of these terms, from content you host, or from the conduct of players you invite.

15. Changes

We may update these terms. Material changes will be announced at least 14 days before they take effect, and continuing to use the service after that constitutes acceptance. If you do not accept a change, you may cancel before it takes effect.

16. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York and the United States, and the courts there have exclusive jurisdiction. If any clause is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

17. Contact

Questions about these terms go to our contact page.

Last updated: draft, unpublished.