Fair Use Policy

About this Policy

This Fair Use Policy ("FUP") applies to Plans marketed as offering "unlimited" resources (such as Cloud Power, Email Business, and any future "unlimited" tier). It is part of the Agreement at /legal/terms and is incorporated into the Service.

Our promise: "unlimited" resources are designed for the way real customers use them. The thresholds below describe where we will reach out to talk to you, not where we silently bill or throttle. The competitor pattern we object to is FUPs that activate without warning and bill retroactively. Ours is the opposite: explicit numbers, advance notification, and a conversation before any enforcement.

1. Bandwidth (Cloud Power)

1.1 Fair-use threshold: 20 TB of outbound network transfer per calendar month per account. This is enough for a typical busy site running media galleries, customer downloads, or e-commerce traffic without exhausting cache.

1.2 If you exceed 20 TB in a month, we email you on the day you cross the threshold with: your usage to date, projected month-end usage, and two options.

1.3 The two options: (a) move to a metered plan at approximately NZ$1.70/TB above the 20 TB threshold (mirrors our upstream Hetzner egress cost); or (b) we help you configure a CDN cache layer (Cloudflare cache rules, free), which typically eliminates 80–95% of origin egress.

1.4 We do not throttle, suspend, or silently bill while we wait for your response. The 21st-and-beyond TB is not billed retroactively unless you opt in to option (a).

2. Storage (Cloud Power)

2.1 Fair-use threshold: 500 GB total storage used across all sites, databases, mailboxes, and uploads on your account.

2.2 Above 500 GB we email with a breakdown of where the storage is concentrated and offer either: consolidation help (we identify redundant data, old backups, oversized media) or migration to a dedicated metered storage plan.

2.3 No silent throttling. Customer backups remain available regardless of overage status.

3. Mailboxes (Cloud Power, Email Business)

3.1 Fair-use threshold: 500 active mailboxes per account. "Active" means received or sent mail in the last 6 months.

3.2 Above 500 active mailboxes we will reach out to discuss moving your account to a dedicated Stalwart instance with explicit per-mailbox pricing (typically NZ$1.50/mailbox/mo for the upper tier).

3.3 Inactive mailboxes do not count toward the threshold.

4. Websites (Cloud Power)

4.1 There is no fixed count cap on the number of websites you can host on Cloud Power. Instead, per-site resource consumption is monitored.

4.2 If a single site is consistently consuming more than 25% of its node's CPU or memory over a 7-day window, we will contact you with the metrics and offer migration to a dedicated VPS plan (Cloud Servers), where pricing matches the actual resources consumed.

4.3 The check is at the site level, not the account level. A handful of low-traffic sites adding up to high aggregate usage will not trigger this rule; one site consistently consuming a disproportionate share will.

5. Enforcement principles

5.1 No surprise. We email you the same day a threshold is crossed, with a copy to the billing contact.

5.2 No silent throttling. Service quality is not degraded while we wait for your response, up to a reasonable conversation window (typically 14 days).

5.3 No retroactive billing. Overage above the threshold is not charged unless you opt in to a metered overage option.

5.4 No suspension without notice. If a customer does not respond within 30 days of repeated notifications and continues to materially exceed thresholds in a way that affects other customers, we may suspend the account after a final 7-day notice. Service credits under the SLA accrue from the suspension date onward.

6. Changes to this Policy

6.1 We may update the thresholds above. Any reduction in threshold (less generous) requires 30 days' advance notice to all customers on affected Plans. Threshold increases (more generous) take effect immediately.

6.2 Thresholds reflect our actual upstream infrastructure costs. If those costs change materially (Hetzner egress, Cloudflare R2, Stalwart compute), thresholds will move to maintain Plan viability.

Contact

Questions about this Policy or about your usage: [email protected].

If you receive a fair-use notification and want to discuss your options, reply directly to the notification email. It routes to our support team.