General Acceptable Use Policy

Last Updated:

August 19, 2025

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

Illegal Activity

Customer may only use DreamHost Services for lawful purposes. Customer is responsible for ensuring that their use of Services complies with all applicable regulations. Use of DreamHost services in a manner that is reasonably believed to be ​​in violation of applicable law may result in disablement, suspension, or termination. DreamHost does not act as a law enforcement body, or as an arbiter of legality, but reserves the right to take appropriate action in response to clear, credible indications of unlawful activity. To this effect, CSAM material 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 infrastructure. Additionally, using DreamHost's infrastructure to conspire to commit or support the commission of illegal activities is forbidden as well.

Hacking

Use of DreamHost’s infrastructure to engage in, coordinate, or otherwise facilitate malicious hacking activities, including the distribution of tools, software, or resources intended for unauthorized access, disruption, or attack, is strictly prohibited. This includes attempting to access any system, service, or network without the owner’s consent.

Service Interruptions

Any activity that causes service interruptions to either DreamHost's infrastructure or any outside infrastructure is prohibited. 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.

Spamming

Spamming in any form is strictly prohibited. Customer agrees to not utilize, distribute, or in any way make available tools or methods to send unsolicited e-mail or usenet postings (spam), or to use DreamHost infrastructure 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. More details about our Anti-Spam Policy can be found here

Personal Information Harvesting

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

Blacklisting

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

Investment sites

FOREX, cryptocurrency exchanges, or similar services/sites are prohibited on all DreamHost platforms.

Spoofing/Impersonation

Use of DreamHost infrastructure 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 relating 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 infrastructure, 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 instances, and VPS instances, the customer agrees to make use of DreamHost’s hosting servers primarily for the purpose of hosting a website and associated email functions. Data uploaded must be primarily for this purpose.

DreamHost hosting servers 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 permitted. Further, mail accounts cannot be used for file storage, such as for security cameras, storage of emails used to transfer files, or similar archival purposes. We reserve the right to delete personal backups in accordance with the Unlimited Policy

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

Abusive Scripts/Processes

Any script or process. that adversely affects the ability of any other customer to satisfactorily use their provided services, or that negatively impacts DreamHost infrastructure, is prohibited. 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 specific hosting environment or plan.

IRC Bots/Bouncers

All IRC bots and “bouncers,” including software or services that maintain a persistent connection to an IRC server or mask a user’s IP address, are prohibited on all DreamHost platforms.

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 prohibited on all DreamHost platforms.

Proxy Software

All proxy software, anonymous or otherwise, is prohibited on all DreamHost platforms.

Network Daemons

With the exception of DreamHost Dedicated Servers, Cloud products, DreamPress instances, and VPS instances, any process that opens a network socket to accept connections from external networks is prohibited. 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 negatively impact DreamHost infrastructure.