General Acceptable Use Policy

Last Updated:

September 23, 2021

The following statements pertain to all products and services offered by DreamHost, including DreamCompute and DreamObjects:

Illegal Activity

Customer may only use DreamHost Web Hosting's Server for lawful purpose. Transmission of any material in violation of any Country, Federal, State or Local regulation is prohibited. To this effect, child pornography is strictly prohibited as well as housing any copyrighted information (to which the customer does not hold the copyright or an appropriate license) on DreamHost Web Hosting's Server. Also, using DreamHost's servers or network to conspire to commit or support the commission of illegal activities is forbidden as well.

Hacking

Websites dedicated to the discussion of hacking activities or the distribution of hacking tools are prohibited. Also, the usage of DreamHost's computer systems or network to access any system, service, or network without the owner's consent is expressly forbidden.

Service Interruptions

Any activity which causes service interruptions to either DreamHost's network/servers or any outside network. This includes, but is not limited to, the execution of Denial of Service attacks or other maliciously configured software.

Mining of Cryptocurrencies.

Mining of any cryptocurrency is prohibited on any DreamHost platform. This includes but is not limited to individual, collective, or cloud mining of any digital currency.

Anonymous Proxies

Anonymous proxies are easily abused and often cause a negative impact on both the servers and the network they are connected to. As such, they're prohibited on DreamHost's network and servers.

Spamming

Customer agrees to not have any content on their site that advocates, sells or in any way makes available tools or methods to send unsolicited e-mail or usenet postings (spam), or to use DreamHost Web Hosting's Servers for relaying unsolicited e-mail or usenet postings, or to use unsolicited e-mail or usenet postings to advertise for their site hosted at DreamHost. Any complaint we receive about a violation of this or the preceding two points will be taken very seriously and will result in immediate account cancellation without a refund. More details about our anti-spam policy can be found here

Personal Information Harvesting

Collecting or using email addresses, screen names or other personal identifiers without the consent of the person identified (including, without limitation, phishing, Internet scamming, password robbery, spidering, and harvesting).

Blacklisting

You agree that if the DreamHost IP numbers assigned to your account are listed on an abuse database or blacklist like Spamhaus, you will be in violation of this AUP, and DreamHost may take reasonable action to protect its IP numbers, including suspension and/or termination of your service, regardless of whether the IP numbers were listed as a result of your actions.

Investment sites

FOREX, egold exchange, etc.

Spoofing/Impersonation

Usage of the DreamHost network to impersonate another person or entity, be it through Email, Internet Forums, or any other means, is strictly prohibited. This includes spoofing email or network packet headers whether or not it is done for malicious purposes.

Spamdexing

Customer agrees to not engage in activities pertaining to Black Hat SEO, Spamdexing, and so-called "Scraper sites." These can all have a severely detrimental effect on server performance and are not permitted.

Any conduct that is likely to result in retaliation against DreamHost's network or website, or DreamHost's employees, officers or other agents, including engaging in behavior that results in any server being the target of a denial of service attack (DoS).

Personal Backups

With the exception of DreamHost Dedicated Servers, Cloud products, DreamPress accounts, and VPS instances provisioned on or after November 12th, 2014, the customer agrees to make use of DreamHost Web Hosting servers primarily for the purpose of hosting a website, and associated email functions. Data uploaded must be primarily for this purpose.

DreamHost Web Hosting services are not intended to be used for data backup or archiving purposes. For example, you are not allowed to import or store personal mail archives. Forwarding all emails from another fully-hosted email address for archival purposes is no longer allowed. Further, mail accounts cannot be used for file storage, such as for security cameras, storage of emails used to transfer files, etc.

NOTE: We reserve the right to delete your mail archives if they get out of hand!

We also reserve the right to negotiate additional charges with the Customer and/or the discontinuation of the backups/archives at their discretion. If you exceed your allocated transfer bandwidth for a month, you will be billed at the rate of $1 per additional 10GB.

Shared Hosting Addendum

The following statements pertain exclusively to shared web hosting products and services offered by DreamHost.

Adult Thumbnail Galleries/Banner Exchanges

You agree not to run a banner exchange, free adult tgp (thumbnail gallery post), or free adult image galleries on your website.

Abusive Scripts/Processes

Any script/process/etc that adversely affects the ability of any other customer to satisfactorily use their provided services is forbidden. This includes, but is not limited to, CPU-intensive CGI/PHP scripts and websites for which the scale of traffic has exceeded the acceptable limits of a shared hosting environment.

IRC Bots/Bouncers

All IRC bots and “bouncers” (bnc, etc) are forbidden.

BitTorrent software

While we recognize the value in the BitTorrent protocol as a distribution method, it is far too easily (and often accidentally) abused/misused and therefore not allowed on DreamHost Shared Hosting services.

Proxy Software

All proxy software, anonymous or otherwise, is forbidden on DreamHost Shared Hosting services.

Network Daemons

Any process that opens a network socket to accept connections from external networks is forbidden. Processes are allowed to bind to the local host only, but are held to the limitations placed on all other processes. They must not use up more than their fair share of resources and they must not interfere with any other customers' activities.