Terms of service

These terms apply when you buy or use hosting from HostCrafter. Placing an order means you accept them, so please read them before you pay rather than after. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you are confirming you are allowed to.

Four other pages are part of this agreement and carry the detail: the acceptable use policy, the refund and cancellation policy, the domain registration terms, and the privacy policy. Where one of them covers a subject in more detail than this page does, the detailed one is the one that applies.

Who can buy

• You must be 18 or older, or have the consent of a parent or guardian who accepts these terms with you.
• The details you give us must be true — your real name, a real address, a working email and phone number. An account opened with false details, or with someone else's payment method, can be closed without notice and without a refund.
• We may ask you to verify who you are before or after an order — a government ID, a business registration, or confirmation from the payment method's owner. This is not routine and we do not enjoy asking; it happens when an order looks like fraud or when a payment provider requires it. An order we cannot verify is refunded and cancelled, not kept.
• We cannot sell to anyone in a country under sanctions that apply to us, or to anyone on a sanctions list. If that changes for an existing account we will tell you and refund the unused part of your term.

The service

We provide managed WordPress hosting on the plan you bought, with the resources listed on the pricing page for that plan. Those figures are ceilings we enforce in the kernel, not estimates.

What that includes: the server and its operating system, the web server, PHP, the database, the caching layers, mail, SSL certificates, daily backups for the retention your plan states, staging where the plan includes it, and the panel you manage all of it from. We keep those current and secure.

Hosting is set up automatically and is usually ready within minutes of a successful payment. If an order needs a manual check we will tell you the same working day.

We may change what a plan includes for new orders at any time. Your own plan keeps what it had when you bought it, at the price you bought it at, for as long as you keep renewing it. If we ever have to withdraw a feature from an existing plan we will give you 30 days' notice and you may cancel for a pro-rata refund of the unused term.

Uptime

We aim for 99.9% availability of the hosting service, measured monthly. That leaves about 43 minutes in a month, and it is a target we hold ourselves to and publish, not a contract with money attached.

We are deliberately not selling an uptime guarantee with service credits. A credit worth a few rupees is not what you want on a bad day, and a young platform promising payouts on a percentage it has not yet measured over years would be selling you theatre. What you get instead is the number we aim at, monitoring that watches it, and a straight answer when we miss.

The target excludes, because none of these are the service failing: announced maintenance; emergency work, where the alternative is a longer outage; anything caused by your own site, theme, plugins or code; attacks aimed at your site or at another customer's; your domain's DNS or a third-party service you connected; and events outside our reasonable control.

Prices, offers, and where you saw them

Prices change. Offers end. Pages get cached, screenshots get shared, review sites and coupon sites copy our figures and then do not come back to update them, and our own social media posts stay up long after the promotion behind them has closed.

So there is one rule, and it is simple: the price shown on the final checkout page, on the order you are about to pay for, is the price. It is the only one that binds either of us.

That applies to any figure you saw anywhere else — an older page of this website, a cached copy, our Facebook, Instagram, X or YouTube accounts, an advertisement, a comparison article, a coupon site, an email, or something a person told you. If any of those disagrees with checkout, checkout is right. We will not honour an out-of-date price, and we would rather say that here than argue about it later.

Taxes are applied where the law requires them, and checkout shows the total you will actually be charged.

Your account

• Keep your password and your details accurate. You are responsible for what happens under your account, including what anyone you give access to does.
• Turn on two-factor authentication. It is the single most effective thing you can do, and an account compromised because it was off is still your account.
• Keep the registered email address reachable. It is how we prove who you are. If you lose access to it, we can still help — but we will ask you to prove ownership another way, such as from the payment method that paid the invoices or the domain's registrant contact, and that takes longer than a password reset. We would rather be slow than hand your account to somebody else.
• You own your content. We claim nothing over it, and we do not look at it except when we have to in order to fix something you asked us to fix, or to act on a report.
• You are responsible for your own WordPress: the plugins you install, the themes you run and the users you create.
• One domain belongs to one account. The same website cannot be hosted twice on our platform under different accounts.

What is yours, and what is ours

Yours. Your websites, your content, your databases, your media, your customer lists and your code stay yours. Hosting them gives us no rights over them. We do not use them to train anything, we do not license them to anyone, and we do not keep a copy after the deletion dates on this page.

Ours. The panel, the node software, our website, our documentation, our name and our logo are ours. Buying hosting is permission to use them for as long as you are a customer, not a transfer of anything. Please do not copy, resell or reverse-engineer the panel.

Feedback. If you tell us how to make something better, we may act on it and we owe you nothing for it. We are also not obliged to act on it. This is the ordinary arrangement; we mention it only so that nobody thinks a support message created an obligation in either direction.

Naming you. We will not use your name, your logo or your website as a reference or a case study without asking you first.

Acceptable use

The full list is on the acceptable use policy page and it is part of these terms. The summary: no pornography or adult content, no gambling, nothing that harms children, nothing illegal, nothing you do not have the rights to, no malware or phishing, no bulk unsolicited email, and no workload that is not a website — no mining, proxies, VPN exits, file dumps or encoding farms.

Testing your own site is fine; testing our platform is not. Run a vulnerability scan against your own website whenever you like. Do not load-test a shared server, and do not attempt to reach another account, the panel's internals or the node itself. If you want to do something that might look like an attack from where we are sitting, email us first at [email protected] and we will agree a window.

If you find a genuine security flaw in our platform, please tell us at [email protected] before telling anyone else. We will not threaten you for reporting it in good faith.

Shared infrastructure, and what a neighbour can cost you

Managed WordPress hosting at this price is shared hosting done carefully. Your websites run on a server alongside other customers' websites. We put a great deal of engineering into keeping them apart — every account has its own Linux user, its own PHP processes, its own database credentials, and CPU, memory and disk limits the kernel enforces rather than a policy someone reads out to you afterwards.

That containment is real and we stand behind it. It is not the same as a promise that nothing another customer does can ever reach you, and we are not going to pretend it is:

• A denial-of-service attack aimed at one website arrives on a network link and an address that other websites share.
• A customer who breaks these terms — sends spam, hosts a phishing page, gets their site used for an attack — can get the server's address listed by a blocklist or a mail provider that other sites on it then have to live with.
• An extreme load spike, a kernel fault or a hardware failure can slow or interrupt everything on the machine while we deal with it.
• Fixing one of these sometimes needs a reboot or a service restart, which is a short interruption for everyone on that server.

Where a fault is caused by another customer's behaviour, or by an attack aimed at them, we are not liable for the interruption or for what it costs you. What we owe you is the work: we monitor for it, we act on it, we remove the customer causing it, and we tell you what happened. If you need infrastructure that no other customer touches, shared hosting is the wrong product and we will say so before you buy rather than after.

The disclaimer sets this out in full.

Domains

If you register or transfer a domain through us, the domain registration terms apply as well as this page. Domains work differently from hosting in ways that surprise people — registry rules we do not control, a 60-day lock after certain changes, and a registration that cannot be reversed once it is made — so they have their own page.

You are always free to keep your domain wherever it is and simply point it at us. That costs nothing and we would rather tell you so than sell you something you do not need.

Third-party services

Some things you use alongside our hosting are not ours: a third-party CDN, a payment gateway, an email sending service, an SEO tool, a theme or plugin you bought, or a service a plugin talks to. (Our own CDN is not one of these — it is part of the hosting and covered by these terms.)

We may help you connect them, and we will happily debug the connection. But the service itself is between you and that company, on their terms, and we are not responsible for it — for its uptime, its billing, its data handling, or what it does to your site. If one of them changes and breaks something, tell us and we will help you work out what happened.

The same applies in reverse: WordPress itself, and every plugin and theme in it, is third-party software under its own licence.

Backups

We take automatic daily backups and you can restore them yourself from the panel. Each copy expires a fixed number of days after it was taken — 14 days on WordPress Starter, 30 days on every other plan — so the window is always counted from the backup's own date rather than from today.

Automatic backups live outside your account. They do not use your disk allowance, they cannot be reached or deleted over SFTP, and deleting a website does not delete them — which is exactly what makes a deleted site recoverable. Manual copies you take yourself are the opposite: they are yours, they sit in your own space and count against it, and you can download them.

That is a real service and we stand behind it. It is not a substitute for your own copy. Keep your own backups of anything you cannot afford to lose. Backups can fail, retention is finite, and a backup of a site that was already broken restores a broken site.

The law we follow, and the laws we act on

HostCrafter is operated from India. These terms are governed by Indian law, and we comply with it — including the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the rules under it, the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, and applicable tax law.

Being an Indian company does not make us a safe harbour from everyone else's law, and we do not market ourselves as one. Our servers, our network providers and our customers' visitors are in other countries, and we will act on a credible request under the law of a country we operate in or serve. In practice that means:

• Copyright. We act on properly made notices under Indian law and on notices in the form used by the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. See the copyright page.
• European law. Our hosting node is in France, so European data-protection law reaches the data on it. Where a site is aimed at people in the EU or the UK we act on requests made under EU and UK law, including orders under the Digital Services Act.
• Child safety. Any material that sexualises or endangers a child is removed immediately, the account is closed permanently without a refund, and it is reported to the authorities. There is no notice period, no appeal, and no second account. This is the one rule on this page we will never exercise discretion about.
• Law enforcement. We answer lawful requests from Indian authorities, and credible requests from foreign authorities where the law allows us to. We will tell you that a request was made unless we are forbidden from doing so.

Nothing here is us volunteering your data. We ask for the legal basis, we check the request is genuine, and we give the narrowest answer that satisfies it.

Liability

Where we are liable, our total liability to you in any twelve-month period is limited to what you paid us in that period. We are not liable for lost profit, lost data, lost business, lost search rankings, wasted expenditure or any indirect or consequential loss.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law — including for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for our own fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else Indian law does not permit us to exclude. If a court finds part of this section unenforceable, the rest still stands.

If someone sues us over your website

You agree to cover our reasonable costs, damages and legal fees if a third party brings a claim against us because of what you hosted or did here — content you had no right to publish, a trademark you used, data you handled unlawfully, or a breach of these terms.

This is not us reaching for your wallet over an outage. It is the ordinary position that the person who published something answers for it, and a host is not the author. If a claim like that arrives, we will tell you promptly, we will not settle it in your name without asking you, and we will let you take the defence if you want it.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top of this page is when they last changed. If a change materially affects you we will email the address on your account at least 30 days beforehand, and you may cancel before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the change.

The small print, kept short

• Events outside our control. Neither of us is liable for failing to do something because of war, civil unrest, natural disaster, epidemic, government action, a failure of the internet's own infrastructure, or a datacentre or power failure we could not reasonably have prevented. We will still tell you what is happening.
• Transferring this agreement. You may not transfer your account to someone else without asking us — mostly so that we know who we are hosting for. We may transfer this agreement if the business is sold or reorganised, and your terms and price come with it.
• If one part fails. If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
• Not enforcing something once does not mean we have given up the right to enforce it later.
• Notices. Ours go to the email address on your account, so keep it reachable. Yours go to the address for the subject, listed on the contact page.
• The whole agreement is this page and the four documents named at the top. Nothing said in a chat window, an advertisement or a sales conversation adds to it — if you were promised something that matters, get it in writing from us and we will honour it.
• No third parties. Only you and we can enforce this agreement.

Governing law, and how to complain

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts of India have exclusive jurisdiction.

If something has gone wrong, start with [email protected] — most problems are solved there the same day. If that does not resolve it, write to [email protected]. We acknowledge a formal complaint within 24 hours and aim to resolve it within 15 days.

Legal notices, copyright complaints and requests from authorities: [email protected]. Reports of abuse coming from a site we host: [email protected].