Terms, privacy and abuse

Gigahost’s legal pages are on the website, where every footer links them:

• Terms of Service: the agreement for renters and providers, with refunds, the right of withdrawal and the rules for providers.
• Acceptable Use Policy: what instances may not be used for, first of all illegal content, port scanning and email spam.
• Privacy Policy: what Gigahost keeps, why and for how long, and every cookie the website sets.
• Legal notice: who runs Gigahost, and the address.
• Report abuse: how anyone reports abuse or illegal content from an instance.

Gigahost is run by Max Wittal, a sole proprietor in Cha-Am, Thailand. Two mailboxes reach the operator:

• legal@ghostrack.io for anything formal: questions about the terms, privacy requests, withdrawals, refunds, and contesting a restriction.
• abuse@ghostrack.io for abuse reports and notices of illegal content.

For help with the service itself, a support ticket is the way in.

If an instance is held or the account is suspended

To stop a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy, the operator may stop one instance and hold it stopped, or suspend the whole account. Either way you are told in your notifications, marked From the operator, with what was seen, the rule it breaks and how to contest it, unless a legal order forbids telling you. The account and the instance page show the hold or the suspension with its reason as long as it lasts.

A held instance stays stopped until the hold is released: it cannot be started, reinstalled, restored, upgraded or moved meanwhile. You can still read it, back it up and delete it. Once the hold is released it stays stopped until you start it.

A suspended account keeps everything it has: you can log in, read your instances, backups, balance and history, and your data stays where it is. Its instances are stopped and held, and the account cannot change anything, with three exceptions: support tickets, so you can contest the suspension, your notifications, and logging in and out. A suspended account that also hosts instances has its hosts closed to new rentals. Held instances keep billing as any stopped instance does, so keep an eye on the balance while you contest.

To contest a hold or a suspension, open a support ticket and say why; for anything formal, write to legal@ghostrack.io. When the suspension is lifted, its instances stay stopped until you start them again.

Records kept by law

Thai law, where the operator is, requires a service provider to keep traffic data for at least 90 days (the Computer-Related Crime Act, section 26). So Gigahost keeps, for 90 days:

• which account and instance held each public IP address it gives an instance, and for an address shared with other instances which ports, from when to when;
• the IP address of each login to the website and of each change made with the account key, such as with ghost, by day.

They hold no traffic content and no addresses your instances connect to. They are kept longer only when an authority orders it for a named account, and are read only to answer an authority or a court, or an abuse report about an address. The Privacy Policy has the detail.