Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy applies to anyone who uses a service provided by Devute Ltd, a private limited company registered in England and Wales (company number 14301159), whose registered office is at 53 Leafield Avenue, Bradford, England, BD2 3SE ("we", "us"). It covers our managed hosting (including WordPress hosting, web hosting and cloud servers), SMTP and transactional email, our software products and SaaS tools (including NexeLead, Legal CRM, ERP System and CRM System), our client portals (client.devute.com and my.devute.com), and any other system we give you access to.

"You" means the customer who holds the account and anyone the customer allows to use it, including staff, contractors and the customer's own users. The customer is responsible for making sure everyone using its account follows this policy.

This policy forms part of our Terms of Business and Subscription Terms. If there is a conflict, the agreement you signed with us takes priority, except where this policy is needed to comply with the law or protect our systems.

You must not use our services to store, publish, send or link to content that:

• is illegal in the UK or in the place where it is accessed, including content that is illegal under the Online Safety Act 2023;
• sexually exploits or abuses children, or appears to do so (we will report this to the authorities);
• promotes terrorism or violent extremism, or incites violence or hatred;
• is defamatory, harassing, threatening or intended to intimidate;
• is fraudulent or misleading, including fake shops, fake reviews and investment scams;
• breaches someone's privacy or data protection rights, such as publishing personal data without a lawful basis;
• sells or promotes goods or services that are illegal to supply.

You must not use our services to:

• host, distribute or link to viruses, ransomware, trojans, spyware or other malicious code;
• run phishing pages, or pages that imitate another organisation to obtain passwords, payment details or personal data;
• operate botnets, command-and-control servers, or open proxies and relays that others can misuse;
• commit or assist fraud, including card testing and identity theft.

If your site is compromised and starts doing any of these things without your knowledge, we may still need to take it offline while the problem is fixed. We will work with you to restore it.

You must not:

• access, or try to access, any account, system or data you are not authorised to use, including other customers' accounts on shared infrastructure;
• scan, probe or test the vulnerability of our systems or networks, or anyone else's, without written permission from the owner;
• launch or take part in denial-of-service attacks;
• bypass or interfere with authentication, rate limits, monitoring or other security controls;
• share login details with people who are not authorised to use the account.

If you believe you have found a security weakness in one of our services, please report it to info@devute.com and do not exploit it. We welcome responsible reports.

You must not use our services to store, publish or distribute material that infringes copyright, trade marks, database rights or other intellectual property, including pirated software, media or fonts, or images used without a licence.

If we receive a credible notice that material on your account infringes someone's rights, we may remove or disable it and will normally tell you so that you can respond.

Most of our hosting runs on shared infrastructure, so one account's heavy use can affect others. You must not:

• mine cryptocurrency, or run blockchain nodes, on any of our services;
• run processes that use an excessive share of CPU, memory, disk input/output or bandwidth, or that persist when not needed;
• use hosting space as general file storage, backup storage or a file-sharing or media-streaming service unrelated to your website;
• run heavy crawlers, scrapers or automated traffic generators;
• make excessive or abusive calls to our APIs or software products, or try to avoid usage limits.

Where a plan is described as unlimited or does not state a limit, it is subject to fair use: reasonable use for a typical website or business of that kind. If your use is regularly above what your plan is designed for, we will contact you to discuss an upgrade or changes before we take any other action, unless immediate action is needed to protect the service.

If you send email through our SMTP or transactional email services, or from email accounts hosted with us, you must:

• only send marketing email to people who have consented to receive it, or where another lawful basis under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR) applies, such as the soft opt-in for existing customers;
• include a clear, working unsubscribe link in every marketing email, and act on unsubscribe requests promptly, and within the time required by law;
• identify yourself as the sender, use accurate "from" details and subject lines, and give a valid contact address;
• keep your lists clean by removing addresses that bounce or complain;
• set up the sender authentication records (such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC) we ask for.

You must not:

• send spam or bulk unsolicited email, including to bought, rented, scraped or harvested lists;
• send email that disguises its origin or uses forged headers;
• use our transactional email service for bulk marketing unless your plan allows it.

We monitor bounce and complaint rates. If they are high enough to put our sending reputation at risk, we may pause sending from your account while we work with you to fix the cause.

When using our software products and portals, you must not:

• copy, resell, sublicense or provide the software to third parties except as your agreement allows;
• reverse engineer or decompile the software, except where the law allows this and cannot be excluded;
• upload personal data you do not have a lawful basis to process, or special category data unless the product is designed for it and you have the right safeguards in place;
• use the products to build a competing product using our confidential information.

Where we process personal data on your behalf in these products, our Data Processing Addendum applies.

You are responsible for the content and activity on your account, including anything your users or a compromised plugin or script does. In particular you should keep software, themes and plugins you install up to date where these are not covered by a care plan, use strong passwords and two-factor authentication where available, and tell us promptly if you suspect your account has been compromised.

If we reasonably believe this policy has been breached, we may:

• contact you and ask you to fix the problem within a reasonable time;
• remove or disable access to the content concerned;
• limit resources, pause email sending, or suspend all or part of the service;
• terminate the service, for serious or repeated breaches, in line with your agreement;
• report suspected illegal activity to the police or other authorities and share information with them where the law allows or requires.

Where we can, we will warn you first and give you a chance to put things right. We will act without notice where the breach is serious, where there is a risk to our systems, other customers or the public, or where the law requires it. We will restore the service once the problem is resolved, unless we have terminated it.

A suspension for breach of this policy does not stop charges under your agreement. We are not responsible for losses you suffer because we took reasonable action under this policy.

If you believe any service we host or provide is being used in breach of this policy, for example to send spam, host phishing or malware, or infringe your rights, please email info@devute.com with as much detail as you can, such as web addresses, email headers, dates and times.

We review every report and take action where it is justified. We may not be able to tell you the outcome where that would involve sharing another customer's information.

We may update this policy to reflect changes in the law, our services or the threats we see. The date at the top of this page shows when it was last updated. We will give you reasonable notice of significant changes where we can.