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Terms of service.

The agreement between you and us: what you can run, what we will do about it if something goes wrong, and how the money works. No traps buried in clause 14.

Last updated: 3 August 2026 Governed by the law of England & Wales

These terms are the contract between you and Echo Host Ltd, a company registered in England & Wales and trading as Echo Host. They apply the moment you place an order or use any of our services, so it is worth ten minutes now rather than an argument later.

Two other documents form part of this agreement and should be read with it: our Service Level Agreement, which sets out our uptime commitment and the service credits payable if we miss it, and our Privacy Policy, which explains what we do with your personal data.

If you are a consumer rather than a business, nothing in these terms removes or reduces your statutory rights under UK consumer law. Where a clause here conflicts with those rights, your statutory rights win.

We, us, our
Echo Host Ltd, trading as Echo Host.
You, your, the customer
The person or organisation named on the account.
Service
Any product you order from us: a game server, a web hosting plan, a domain name, or anything else we agree to provide.
Shared plan
Any plan where your service runs on a machine alongside other customers — which is all of our standard game and web hosting plans.
Client area
The billing and account portal where you manage your services, invoices and payment methods.
Your content
Everything you put on a service: files, game worlds, databases, websites, email, configuration and anything uploaded by the people who use your service.
Billing period
The month or year that a service is paid for in advance, running from the date the service was activated or last renewed.

You must be at least 18 years old to hold an account with us. If you are buying on behalf of a company or another organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to enter into this agreement for it, and the agreement is with that organisation as well as with you.

The details on your account must be accurate and kept up to date. We use the email address on the account for invoices, renewal notices, maintenance windows and security alerts, so an address you no longer read is a problem you will notice at the worst possible moment.

You are responsible for:

  • keeping your password and any API keys secret, and using a password you do not reuse elsewhere;
  • everything done through your account, including by anyone you grant sub-user or panel access to;
  • the content and conduct of the service you run, including what your own players or site visitors do on it;
  • telling us promptly at support@echohost.co.uk if you think your account has been compromised.

We will never ask you for your password. Any message that does is not from us.

We will provide the service you ordered with reasonable skill and care, to the specification shown on the plan you bought at the time you bought it. Resource figures such as memory, storage, vCPU and bandwidth are the limits allocated to your service, not a promise of any particular level of game or application performance, which depends heavily on what you choose to run.

We may improve, alter or replace the underlying hardware, software and control panels over time. Where a change would materially reduce what your plan offers, we will give you at least 30 days' notice and you may cancel and receive a pro-rata refund of any period paid for and not used.

We do not provide, endorse or support third-party game software, mods, plugins, themes or scripts you choose to install. We will help where we reasonably can, but a broken mod is not a fault in the service.

This is the part that actually matters, and we enforce it. You must not use any service we provide, or allow anyone else to use it, for any of the following.

  • Attacks and attack tooling. No denial-of-service or distributed denial-of-service activity of any kind, whether aimed at us, at another customer or at anyone else on the internet. No running, hosting, advertising or selling booter, stresser or IP-puller services. No load testing another party's infrastructure without their written permission. No port scanning, brute-forcing, credential stuffing or attempts to gain unauthorised access to any system.
  • Malware. No creating, storing, distributing or serving viruses, worms, trojans, ransomware, keyloggers, rootkits, exploit kits or phishing pages. No operating a botnet or a command-and-control node, and no participating in one.
  • Illegal content and activity. Nothing that is unlawful under the law of England & Wales. That includes, without limitation, child sexual abuse material, content that encourages terrorism, content that infringes someone else's copyright or trade marks, fraudulent or deceptive schemes, the sale of controlled goods you are not licensed to sell, and material that harasses, threatens or incites violence against people.
  • Cryptomining on shared plans. No mining, minting, plotting, farming or staking cryptocurrency, and no running any sustained workload whose purpose is generating digital currency, on any shared game or web hosting plan. It is the one workload that reliably ruins a shared machine for everybody else on it. Talk to us about dedicated hardware if this is what you need.
  • Spam. No unsolicited bulk email, no purchased or scraped mailing lists, no open mail relays, no forged headers or sender addresses, and no hosting a website or landing page that is advertised by spam sent from anywhere else.
  • Reselling and misuse. No reselling the service as your own hosting product without a written reseller agreement with us, and no using a hosting plan purely as bulk file storage, a personal backup target or a media distribution service.

You must also comply with the terms of any game, software or licence you run on our platform. If a publisher's rules say you cannot host something a particular way, those rules apply to you here too.

We investigate every abuse report we receive. For the most serious categories — attacks, malware, and illegal content — we will suspend a service immediately and without notice, and no refund is due. For everything else we will normally contact you first and give you a reasonable chance to put it right.

Shared plans work because typical usage is uneven: the resources you are not using at 3am are available to someone who is. We do not oversell, but we do expect fair use.

On a shared plan, please do not:

  • run a process that pins every allocated core at full load indefinitely, where the workload is not the service you bought the plan for;
  • generate sustained disk input and output high enough to degrade other services on the same host;
  • use web hosting storage for material unrelated to the websites it hosts, such as personal media libraries or archive backups;
  • send bulk email in volumes that put the platform's sending reputation at risk.

If your usage starts to affect other customers we will email you first, explain what we are seeing, and help you either tune the service or move to a plan or a dedicated machine that fits. We only throttle or suspend where the impact on others is immediate and we cannot reach you. Upgrades are charged pro-rata, so moving up mid-month is not a penalty.

Prices are shown in pounds sterling and exclude VAT, which is added at checkout where it applies. All services are paid for in advance, and a service is provisioned once payment has cleared.

Renewals

Services renew automatically on the same billing period until you cancel them. We issue the renewal invoice at least seven days before the due date and email it to you, and where you have a stored payment method we will attempt to take payment on the due date. It is your responsibility to keep a valid payment method on the account if you want the service to continue.

The price you sign up at is the price you renew at. If we ever change the price of a plan, existing customers get at least 30 days' notice before it applies to a renewal, and you are free to cancel instead.

Late payment

If an invoice is not paid by its due date we may suspend the service after three days. Suspension means the service stops but the data is still there. If the invoice remains unpaid 14 days after the due date we may terminate the service and delete the data, which cannot be undone. We will send reminders before either step.

Cancelling

You can cancel any service from the client area at any time. Tell us before the renewal invoice is due and nothing further is charged. A cancellation can take effect immediately or at the end of the period you have already paid for — your choice at the point of cancelling.

Cancelling part way through a period does not entitle you to a refund of the unused part, except under the money-back guarantee below or where we have given notice of a material change or a price rise. Domain registrations cannot be cancelled or refunded once registered, because the registry fee is paid and non-returnable.

If your first purchase is not what you hoped for, tell us within 14 days and we will refund it in full. No interrogation, no restocking fee.

The detail:

  • It applies to your first purchase of a game server or web hosting plan, once per customer.
  • The 14 days run from the date the service was first activated.
  • Renewals are excluded. The guarantee covers a first purchase, not the invoices that follow it. If you no longer want a service, cancel it before it renews.
  • Also excluded: upgrades and add-ons, domain name registrations, transfers and renewals, third-party licences we buy on your behalf, and any bespoke setup or migration work already carried out.
  • It is not available where the service has been suspended or terminated for breach of the acceptable use section above.

To claim, email support@echohost.co.uk from the address on your account within the 14 days. Refunds go back to the payment method you used, normally within five working days and always within 14. Consumers keep their separate statutory cancellation rights; this guarantee sits on top of them, it does not replace them.

We may suspend or terminate a service, or an entire account, where:

  • an invoice is overdue, as described above;
  • the acceptable use section has been breached;
  • the service is compromised, is being used to attack others, or is putting the platform or other customers at risk;
  • a payment is reversed or a chargeback is raised without contacting us first;
  • the account details are false, or the account was opened to evade a previous termination;
  • we are required to act by law, by a court, or by a regulator;
  • a member of our team is abused or threatened.

Where the risk is immediate we will act first and explain immediately afterwards. Otherwise we will contact you, tell you exactly what the problem is, and give you a reasonable opportunity to fix it.

Following termination we keep your data for 14 days so that a genuine mistake can be put right, and then delete it permanently. Termination does not cancel invoices already due for services already provided.

You may terminate at any time by cancelling in the client area. We may terminate without cause by giving you 30 days' notice, in which case we will refund the unused part of anything you have paid for in advance.

Our backups are a courtesy, not a guarantee, and they are not a substitute for your own. Where a plan includes backups we take them on the schedule advertised for that plan and we do our genuine best to keep them usable.

But we do not warrant that a backup exists at any given moment, that it is complete, that it is recent, or that a restore will succeed. Backups can fail silently, and a backup of corrupted data is corrupted data. Treat ours as a second line of defence behind your own.

You keep your own copies. Every plan gives you the tools to do it — the file manager, SFTP, database export and the panel's own backup download — and a copy held somewhere other than our platform is the only copy that protects you from losing the account itself. If your service is business-critical, download a copy on a schedule you have actually tested restoring from.

We are not liable for the loss of any of your content, however it is lost, beyond the limits set out in the liability section below.

We commit to 99.9% monthly uptime for the services covered by our Service Level Agreement. That document defines how uptime is measured, what counts as downtime, what is excluded, and the service credits payable when we fall short.

The live state of every public service is published at our status page, and it is the same monitoring data we use ourselves.

Service credits under the SLA are the only remedy available for downtime. If you want to claim one, follow the claims process in the SLA rather than raising it as a general complaint.

12. Your content, our brand

Your content stays yours. We claim no ownership of anything you upload, and we grant ourselves only the narrow permission needed to host it: to store, copy, transmit and back it up so the service can function, and nothing more.

You confirm that you have the right to host what you upload, including any licences needed for games, plugins, fonts, images or code. We do not routinely monitor your content, but we may inspect a service where we are investigating an abuse report, a security incident or a fault, and we may remove content we are legally required to remove.

Our name, logo, website content and the design of our platform remain ours. Using our services does not give you any right to use our branding, and you must not present yourself as us.

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. Everything below is subject to that.

Subject to that, we are not liable to you for:

  • loss of profit, revenue, business, contracts, anticipated savings or goodwill;
  • loss of, or damage to, data or content, including where a backup of ours cannot be restored;
  • business interruption, or the cost of obtaining a substitute service;
  • any loss that is indirect or consequential;
  • anything caused by your own act or omission, your configuration, the software you chose to install, or a third party you gave access to;
  • anything outside our reasonable control, including power and network failures upstream of us, government action, industrial action, and denial-of-service attacks beyond the mitigation capacity we operate.

Our total liability to you for all claims arising in any 12-month period, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), for breach of statutory duty or otherwise, is limited to the total charges you paid us for the affected service in the 12 months before the claim arose.

Where downtime is the complaint, the service credits set out in the SLA are the sole and exclusive remedy.

These limits are a fair reflection of what a hosting service costs and the risk each side is best placed to manage. If the risk to your business is larger than the price of the plan, insure it or talk to us about a bespoke arrangement.

We may update these terms as the business, the platform or the law changes. The date at the top of this page always shows the current version.

For a material change — anything that meaningfully reduces your rights or increases your obligations — we will email account holders at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you do not accept the change, you may cancel before it applies and we will refund the unused portion of any period you have paid for. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the updated terms.

This agreement and any dispute arising out of it, including non-contractual disputes, are governed by the law of England & Wales. The courts of England & Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, except that a consumer resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom may bring proceedings in their local courts.

If any part of these terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. If we do not enforce a right straight away, that is not a waiver of it. This agreement, together with the SLA and the Privacy Policy, is the whole agreement between us and replaces anything discussed beforehand.

No third party has any right to enforce these terms under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.

Questions about these terms, or about anything you are not sure is allowed, go to support@echohost.co.uk. Asking us first is always cheaper than finding out afterwards, and we would rather have the conversation.

Our registered company details appear on every invoice we issue and are available on request.

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The other two documents.

Our Service Level Agreement covers uptime and service credits, and our Privacy Policy explains what we do with your personal data and why it stays in the UK.