Terms of Service
What changed: Each topic is now covered once across these Terms, the AUP and the Privacy Policy. If you cancel because of a change to any of them, you now get a pro-rata refund (clause 25). We no longer pass on the cost of traffic from an attack on your Service (clause 17), and we removed a VPS backup add-on we don't offer.
These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a binding agreement between you ("you", "the Customer") and OzVPS (ABN 58 947 584 850), an Australian hosting business based in Brisbane, Queensland ("OzVPS", "we", "us", "our"), governing your use of our VPS hosting, Enhance-powered Web Hosting and any other services we provide (collectively, the "Services").
These Terms, together with the Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") and Privacy Policy, constitute the entire agreement between you and OzVPS in relation to the Services and supersede all prior representations, proposals, marketing material and informal communications. If there is a conflict between documents, the AUP prevails over these Terms, and these Terms prevail over any informal communication. Changes to any of the three documents follow clause 25.
By signing up for, paying for, or using the Services, you confirm that you have read, understood and agree to be bound by these Terms.
1. Eligibility
To use our Services you must:
- Be at least 18 years of age, or have the consent of a parent or legal guardian who agrees to be bound by these Terms on your behalf
- Provide accurate, current and complete registration information, including any ABN, ACN or business-name details where applicable
- Maintain the security of your account credentials, API keys and SSH keys, and enable two-factor authentication where offered
- Accept responsibility for all activities and content under your account, whether performed by you or by anyone who obtains access to it
- Not be a person or entity subject to Australian or UN sanctions, or otherwise prohibited from receiving the Services under applicable law
2. Services
VPS hosting
Our VPS service is self-managed. We provide a virtual server, network connectivity, the VPS control panel and base operating-system templates. You are responsible for the installation, configuration, security and maintenance of everything inside the VPS: operating system patches, software, application data and backups. We assist with infrastructure issues (network, hypervisor, storage) but do not troubleshoot inside-the-VPS applications, code or configuration.
Each VPS plan includes a monthly data transfer allowance, stated on the plan you purchase. We do not charge overage fees. If you exceed the included allowance, the port for that VPS is rate limited to 1 Mbps until the start of the next billing cycle. The service is not suspended, and you may upgrade at any time to restore full speed. Port speeds are shared and are a maximum, not a guaranteed rate.
Web Hosting
Our Web Hosting service is shared hosting. We operate the underlying server, the Enhance control panel, web/PHP stack, mail services and daily off-site backups. You are responsible for the content you publish, your application code (e.g. WordPress core and plugin updates), the security of your sites, and your account credentials. We do not troubleshoot inside-the-account application issues as part of standard support.
Support
Support is provided in English, through the contact form and ticket system in the client area. We do not offer telephone support. We aim to respond to tickets within twenty-four (24) hours. That is a target we work to, not a service-level agreement, and it is not a term of this agreement. Support covers the infrastructure we operate. It does not extend to writing, debugging, migrating or administering your code, applications, databases or third-party software, and we may decline or charge separately for work outside that scope.
Free 24-hour demo
From time to time we may offer a free 24-hour demo of our VPS or Web Hosting services. Demos are issued at our sole discretion, limited to one active demo per customer or identifiable individual, and are subject to the following:
- The demo is intended for evaluation only, not for production use, commercial workloads, sustained traffic generation, customer-facing content, or any activity prohibited by the AUP
- The demo terminates automatically 24 hours after provisioning. Demo data, snapshots, configurations and IP allocations are permanently deleted at termination and cannot be recovered
- You are responsible for exporting anything you want to keep before the 24-hour window expires
- The demo carries no service level, no availability guarantee, no service credits and no backups
- The demo is provisioned on shared evaluation capacity and resources may differ from a paid plan
- We may suspend, revoke or refuse to issue a demo at any time, without notice, including where we suspect fraud, multi-account abuse, attempted commercial use, or breach of the AUP
- The seven-day money-back guarantee in clause 5 does not apply to demo services (nothing is paid)
- Converting a demo into a paid service requires placing a new order. Demo data and IPs do not transfer automatically
3. Customer warranties
You represent and warrant to OzVPS, on a continuing basis, that:
- You have full legal capacity and authority to enter into and perform these Terms
- All information you provide is true, accurate, current and complete
- You own, license or are otherwise legally entitled to use all content you upload, store, transmit or distribute through the Services
- Your use of the Services will comply with these Terms, the AUP, the Privacy Policy and all applicable laws of Australia and any other jurisdiction where the Services are delivered or consumed
- You will not use the Services in a way that infringes the rights of any third party or that exposes OzVPS, its upstream providers or its data centre operator to legal, regulatory or reputational risk
4. Billing
- All prices are displayed in Australian Dollars (AUD). OzVPS is not registered for GST, so no GST is charged and our invoices are not tax invoices
- Services are billed monthly in advance unless otherwise agreed in writing
- Invoices are due on the date of issue. Services may be suspended seven (7) days after the due date if unpaid, and you remain liable for outstanding charges during any suspension
- A Service suspended for non-payment may be terminated fourteen (14) days after suspension. Clause 11 sets out what then happens to your data
- You are responsible for any chargeback, dishonour or currency-conversion fees we incur as a result of your payment method
- Prices and plan inclusions are subject to change with thirty (30) days' notice for existing customers. Promotional pricing applies for the term stated at the point of order and reverts to the standard plan price thereafter
- You are responsible for any tax obligations that arise from your use of the Services
- No setup fees on standard plans
5. Refunds
We offer a seven (7) day money-back guarantee on the first invoice of a new VPS or Web Hosting service, provided the service has not been used in violation of the AUP. Refunds are not available for:
- Renewal invoices
- Services terminated for breach of the AUP or these Terms
- Add-ons, additional IP addresses, third-party licences, domain registrations or one-off charges
- Services where a chargeback has been initiated
- Services downgraded mid-cycle (the lower plan applies from the next billing date)
6. Fair use
Web Hosting plans include unmetered data transfer and unlimited FTP/SFTP accounts and subdomains, subject to fair use as set out in section 7 of the AUP. Websites, mailboxes, databases and disk space are capped per plan, as stated on the plan you purchase.
7. Service level and availability
The Services are provided on a shared, best-effort basis. We work hard to keep them available and we publish live service status at ozvps.com.au/status, but we do not offer a contractual uptime guarantee or a service-level agreement.
We do not offer refunds, service credits, rebates or other compensation for downtime, latency, packet loss, performance variation or unavailability of the Services. This does not limit any non-excludable right or remedy you may have under the Australian Consumer Law (see clause 15).
Maintenance. We may carry out maintenance on the Services, including work that requires a reboot, a migration or a period of unavailability. For planned maintenance we will give at least twenty-four (24) hours' notice by email or through the status page wherever practicable. Emergency maintenance, and work required to protect the security, stability or integrity of the platform, may be carried out at any time without notice.
Moving your Services. We may move your Service to different hardware, a different node, a different rack or a different Australian facility at any time, and may renumber your IP addresses where that is necessary. We will give reasonable notice where the move involves downtime and it is practicable to do so.
8. Backups
Web Hosting plans include off-site backups taken daily and retained as seven (7) daily copies plus four (4) weekly copies. VPS plans are self-managed, so you are responsible for your own backups.
While we take care of our backup systems, backups are provided as a best-effort convenience and not as a guaranteed service. We do not warrant that any backup will be available, complete, restorable or free of corruption. We strongly recommend you maintain independent off-site backups for any data you cannot afford to lose. Clause 15 covers our liability for lost data.
9. IP addresses
IP addresses assigned to your Service are allocated to you for the duration of that Service only. They remain the property of OzVPS or its upstream providers, are not sold or leased to you, and are not portable to another provider. We may reassign, renumber or reclaim any IP address where required for network operations, renumbering, facility changes, or by direction of an upstream provider or registry.
Reverse DNS (PTR) records are provided as a convenience and may be withheld or removed where a record is misleading, abusive or damaging to the reputation of the range. Keeping our address space off blocklists is covered in section 4 of the AUP.
10. Suspension
We may, at our reasonable discretion and without prior notice, suspend any or all of your Services if:
- An invoice is overdue as described in clause 4
- We reasonably believe the Service is being used in breach of the AUP or these Terms
- We are required to by law, or directed to by a court, regulator, law-enforcement agency or upstream provider
- The Service poses an immediate risk to the security, stability or reputation of our network, our other customers, or our upstream providers
- There is an active security incident, compromise or attack involving the Service
- A chargeback, payment dispute or fraud signal is raised in relation to your account
Suspension does not relieve you of your obligation to pay charges that accrued before the suspension or that continue to accrue during it (for example, where the underlying server resources remain reserved).
11. Cancellation and termination
You may cancel a Service at any time from the client area. Cancellation is effective at the end of the current billing period. Services continue until that date and are not pro-rated, except where the seven-day refund guarantee in clause 5 or clause 25 (changes) applies.
When a Service ends, whether you cancel it or it is terminated, we keep its data for fourteen (14) days and then permanently delete it, unless the law requires us to keep it. You are responsible for exporting your data before then.
We may terminate any or all of your Services, in whole or in part, on notice if you materially breach these Terms or the AUP and (where the breach is capable of remedy) fail to remedy it within a reasonable time. We may terminate immediately, without notice, in any of the cases set out in section 9 of the AUP ("Immediate termination") or where required by law.
We may decline or discontinue service. We may refuse to provide, or decline to continue providing, the Services to any person or for any workload, at our discretion, including where we consider the workload unsuitable for our platform, where we cannot support it, or where accepting it would create disproportionate risk or cost. Where we discontinue an existing Service for a reason other than your breach, we will give you thirty (30) days' notice and refund any unused portion of prepaid fees for that Service.
12. Acceptable use
Your use of the Services must comply with the Acceptable Use Policy, which sets out what is not allowed on our network and how we enforce it.
13. Intellectual property
The OzVPS name, logo, website and related materials are our property or licensed to us. You may not use our trade marks, branding or copyright works without our prior written permission. You retain all rights in content you upload to the Services, and you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, copy, transmit and back up that content only to the extent reasonably necessary to provide the Services to you.
14. Disclaimer of warranties
Other than as expressly set out in these Terms, and subject to any non-excludable rights you have under the Australian Consumer Law, the Services are provided "as is" and "as available". To the maximum extent permitted by law we exclude all representations, warranties, guarantees and conditions, whether express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, uninterrupted availability, freedom from viruses or malware, or non-infringement.
Some elements of the Services rely on third-party or open-source software that we make available but do not author, including control panels (such as Enhance and the VPS control panel), base operating-system templates and the web, PHP and mail stack. That software is provided to you on an "as is" basis and is subject to the licence terms of its respective owners. To the maximum extent permitted by law we give no warranty in relation to it, and you are responsible for keeping the software you install or run inside your VPS or hosting account patched, updated and secure.
We do not warrant that the Services will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure against every possible attack, or that any defect will be corrected within a specified time. You accept that hosting, networking and the internet involve inherent risks that we do not control.
No high-risk or safety-critical use. The Services are a shared, best-effort hosting product and are not designed, intended or authorised for use in any environment where a failure, interruption, delay or error could lead to death, personal injury, or severe physical, environmental or property damage. This includes life-support and other medical applications, emergency or critical communications, the operation of aircraft, vehicles or other transport, nuclear facilities, weapons systems, and industrial or infrastructure control systems. You must not use the Services for any such purpose, and if you do, you do so entirely at your own risk and accept full responsibility for any resulting loss or harm. Nothing in this paragraph limits any non-excludable right or remedy you may have under the Australian Consumer Law (see clause 15).
15. Liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, OzVPS's total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Services, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), statute or otherwise, is limited to the total amount paid by you to OzVPS in the three (3) months immediately preceding the event giving rise to the claim.
We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, punitive or consequential loss, including loss of profits, loss of revenue, loss of business opportunity, loss of goodwill, loss of, corruption of or inability to use any data, loss of anticipated savings, or business interruption, even where the possibility of such loss was advised or was reasonably foreseeable.
Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts or modifies any consumer guarantee, right or remedy conferred by the Australian Consumer Law that cannot be lawfully excluded. Where a consumer guarantee applies and the Service is not of a kind ordinarily acquired for personal, domestic or household use, our liability for failure to comply with that guarantee is limited (at our option) to the supply of the Services again or the payment of the cost of having them supplied again.
Time limit on claims. To the maximum extent permitted by law, and other than for a claim you are entitled to bring under the Australian Consumer Law, you must bring any claim arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Services within twelve (12) months of the date on which you first became aware, or reasonably ought to have become aware, of the circumstances giving rise to it. A claim brought after that period is barred.
Your responsibility for loss you contribute to. Our liability is reduced to the extent that your own act or omission, or that of any person using your Service, caused or contributed to the loss. This includes failing to keep your own backups, failing to apply security updates, using unsupported or end-of-life software, and disclosing or failing to protect your credentials.
16. Indemnity
You indemnify OzVPS, its operators, employees, contractors and upstream providers (collectively, the "Indemnified Parties") on a full-indemnity basis against all claims, demands, proceedings, liabilities, losses, damages, fines, penalties, costs and expenses (including legal costs on a solicitor-and-own-client basis) arising out of or in connection with:
- Your breach of these Terms, the AUP or the Privacy Policy
- Your content, including any third-party claim that your content infringes intellectual property, privacy, defamation or other rights
- Your acts or omissions, or those of any person using your Services (whether authorised or not)
- Any breach by you of applicable law
This indemnity survives termination of these Terms.
17. Costs and recovery
Where your use of the Services, or a breach by you of these Terms or the AUP, causes us to incur costs, you must reimburse those costs on demand. This includes, without limitation:
- Delisting fees, remediation work and administrative time where an IP address or mail range is blocklisted as a result of your activity
- Additional bandwidth or transit charges passed on to us because of traffic your Service sends in breach of the AUP. We do not charge you for traffic from an attack on your Service
- Costs of responding to a subpoena, law-enforcement request, court order or regulatory notice relating to your account, other than where we are prohibited from recovering them
- Chargeback, dishonour and payment-dispute fees, and the reasonable cost of recovering unpaid amounts, including debt-collection and legal costs
We will tell you before incurring recoverable costs wherever it is practicable to do so. It may not be practicable during an active incident.
How we handle a breach, including when we warn you first, is set out in section 12 of the AUP.
18. Force majeure
Neither party is liable for any failure or delay in performance of these Terms (other than payment obligations) caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including: natural disasters, fires, floods, pandemics, war, civil unrest, acts of terrorism, government action, nationwide internet outages, large-scale or novel cyber-attacks, upstream carrier failures, data centre operator failures, hardware defects affecting an entire vendor batch, or industrial action. The affected party will use reasonable efforts to mitigate the impact and resume performance.
19. Resale and assignment
Reselling the Services is covered by section 5 of the AUP. You may not assign or otherwise transfer these Terms or any rights under them without our prior written consent. We may assign these Terms, in whole or in part, in connection with a merger, acquisition, restructure or sale of assets, on the same terms or terms at least as favourable to you, with notice to you.
20. Notices
Legal notices to OzVPS must be sent to legal@ozvps.com.au and are deemed received twenty-four (24) hours after sending. Notices to you will be sent to the email address on your client-area account and are deemed received 24 hours after sending. You are responsible for keeping your contact details up to date.
21. Dispute resolution
Before commencing any court proceeding (other than an urgent application for injunctive or interlocutory relief), the parties will attempt in good faith to resolve any dispute through written negotiation. If the dispute is not resolved within thirty (30) days of written notice of the dispute, either party may then refer the matter to mediation administered by the Resolution Institute (or such other Australian dispute-resolution body as the parties agree). Failing resolution by mediation within a further thirty (30) days, either party may commence proceedings.
22. Governing law
These Terms are governed by the laws of Queensland, Australia. You and OzVPS submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Queensland and the courts of appeal from them.
23. Severability and waiver
If any provision of these Terms is found to be unenforceable, illegal or void in any jurisdiction, that provision is to be read down (or, if that is not possible, severed) to the minimum extent necessary, and the remaining provisions remain in full force and effect. A failure or delay by either party to exercise a right under these Terms does not operate as a waiver of that right.
24. Survival
Clauses that by their nature are intended to survive termination, including without limitation clauses 3 (customer warranties), 4 (billing), 13 (intellectual property), 14 (disclaimer), 15 (liability), 16 (indemnity), 17 (costs and recovery), 20 (notices), 21 (dispute resolution), 22 (governing law) and 23 (severability), survive termination of these Terms.
25. Changes to these Terms and our policies
We may update these Terms, the AUP or the Privacy Policy from time to time. For a material change we will email you and post a notice in the client area at least thirty (30) days before it takes effect. Each document shows its version, the date it was last updated and a short note of what changed.
If you do not agree to a change, you may cancel the affected Service before the change takes effect, and we will refund the fees you have prepaid for the period after your cancellation, calculated pro rata. If you keep using the Services after the change takes effect, the updated version applies to you.
A change that is required by law, or that only corrects an error or makes wording clearer without reducing your rights, may take effect sooner.
26. Contact
Legal enquiries: legal@ozvps.com.au.
Billing enquiries: billing@ozvps.com.au.
General enquiries: sales@ozvps.com.au.
OzVPS (ABN 58 947 584 850). Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
