Terms

Terms of service

Written to be read rather than to be impressive. If anything here is unclear, ask — an unclear term is my problem, not yours.

Paying

Prices are in pounds and include everything — there is no VAT line and no setup fee. You pay the total in bitcoin, over Lightning. Start monthly if you’d rather try me first — most people should. Annual gives you two months free once you know it works.

Nothing is stored, nothing renews automatically, and nothing is ever charged without you doing something. I’ll invoice you and you’ll choose to pay it.

Renewals

·I’ll remind you a week before your renewal, with a link to top up.
·If it hasn’t been paid by the renewal date I’ll tell you, and there’s a week’s grace during which your site stays up.
·After that the account is suspended — still there, just not serving.
·Suspended data is kept for 30 days. I’ll be in touch before anything is deleted.
·Pay and I’ll unsuspend the same day.

A week’s warning either side of the date, so nothing happens to your site without you hearing about it twice first.

If you’re having trouble paying, tell me. A group’s website going dark over £8 helps nobody.

Cancelling, and what you get back

Cancel whenever you like. No notice period, no exit fee, no phone call where I try to talk you out of it.

Monthly — cancel any time, no refund

Your site runs to the end of the month you’ve paid for, and nothing further is charged. There’s nothing to refund — you’re never more than a few weeks committed.

Annual — I refund the months you didn’t use

I work out what you’d have paid monthly for the time you were actually with me, and send back the rest in bitcoin.

Refunds are paid by hand: you send me a Lightning invoice or a bitcoin address, and I pay it.

So on Starter at £80 a year: leave after 3 months and you’ve used £24 of hosting, so you get £56 back. Leave after 6 months and it’s £32.

The honest catch: the two free months are the last two. Annual is cheaper because you committed to a year — if you don’t stay the year, you pay the ordinary monthly price for the months you had. After about ten months there’s nothing left to refund.

If something goes wrong at my end, that’s different — I’ll sort you out, and I’ll be generous about it rather than reaching for this page.

Setup and moving a site

Every plan comes with a cPanel account with mail and SSL ready to use. If you’d like help moving a site you already have, that’s included too, on every plan.

If you are moving a site, before anything is touched I take a full backup of the site as it stands, and if the move goes wrong I put it back the way it was and tell you. We agree a date beforehand — I’d rather say “that one’s awkward, give me a week” than miss a date you were relying on.

I won’t promise no downtime. DNS takes as long as it takes, and some sites are stranger than others. If you think yours might be awkward, email me before ordering and I’ll tell you honestly. If it turns out not to be movable in a reasonable amount of time, you get a full refund.

“Looked after” — if you’ve added it

Optional, £5 a month on any plan, and it means a specific list of things rather than “I’ll sort it”: WordPress core, theme and plugin updates checked monthly; a rollback and an email from me if an update breaks something; one restore from backup a month; DNS and mail record changes on request; SSL and mail problems chased down.

It does not include design, layout, content or copywriting; building new features or adding new sites; debugging custom or third-party code beyond rolling it back; paid plugin licences or anything that needs a developer; or SEO and marketing. That list is deliberately specific — an open-ended promise from one person is one nobody can keep.

Add or drop it whenever you like. If you tick it on the order form it’s added to your subscription at checkout, on the same invoice as your hosting, and renews with it. If you want it later, email me and I’ll add it.

Backups

Your account is backed up daily by the platform, to servers separate from the one your site runs on. I can restore your files, databases or the whole account from those backups on request.

Please keep your own copy too. I say that because it’s true rather than to cover myself: backups are the thing everyone assumes is fine until the day they aren’t.

Uptime

I won’t quote you a number with decimal places. I can’t promise more than the platform underneath me delivers, and there is no pot of money to pay credits from — so a service level agreement would be theatre. What I will do is look into it as soon as I know something’s wrong, tell you what I find, and be honest about why.

It’s one person

Worth being plain about, because it’s the obvious question and you deserve the answer before you pay rather than after. Support is same working day, UK hours, by email. There’s no ticket portal and no overnight cover, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

If I’m away or ill, your site stays up — it runs on a UK platform with its own staff and its own monitoring, not on something in my house. What waits is me: replies, changes, and anything that needs a human. If that ever stops being good enough, you can leave the same day with a full backup in your hand, which is the honest counterpart to all of the above.

Leaving

Whenever you like, no exit fee, no notice period. You get a full backup of your site, databases and email in a standard format any cPanel host can import, and help repointing your DNS. Your domain was always yours, so there’s nothing to release.

I’d rather you left easily and thought well of me than stayed because it was difficult to go. That’s also why monthly exists: you shouldn’t have to trust a small host with a year’s money before you’ve seen it work.

Acceptable use

Covered separately, in plain English, on the acceptable use page. It applies to every account.

Changes

If these terms change materially I’ll email you before it takes effect, not after. Your price won’t change during a term you’ve already paid for.