Acceptable use policy

1. Scope

This policy applies to anyone using services supplied by Smarter Web Solutions Limited, trading as SmartersWeb — including websites we build, hosting we arrange, support we provide and this website itself. It forms part of our terms of service, and it binds your staff, contractors and anybody you give access to.

2. Prohibited content and activity

You must not use our services to publish, store, transmit or facilitate:

• Anything unlawful under the law of England & Wales, or that infringes somebody else's intellectual property, privacy or other rights.
• Child sexual abuse material, or any content that sexualises minors. This is reported to the authorities immediately and without notice to you.
• Material that incites violence, terrorism, or hatred against people on the basis of a protected characteristic.
• Harassment, stalking, doxxing, threats, or content targeting a private individual.
• Malware, ransomware, spyware, exploit kits, botnet infrastructure, phishing pages, or anything designed to compromise systems or credentials.
• Fraud, including fake shops, counterfeit goods, fraudulent invoicing, pyramid and Ponzi schemes, and deceptive investment or cryptocurrency offers.
• Impersonation of a person, business, bank or public authority, and forged documents, receipts, reviews or credentials.
• Unsolicited bulk email, purchased mailing lists, or anything else contravening the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations.
• Deliberately misleading advertising, hidden subscription traps, or checkout flows designed to obtain payment details under false pretences.
• Content that would breach the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations, including fabricated testimonials, invented statistics and fake scarcity.

3. Technical restrictions

On hosting we arrange or administer, you must not:

• Run processes that consume a disproportionate share of a shared server's resources, such as cryptocurrency mining, large-scale scraping or video transcoding.
• Send bulk email through our hosting's mail service. Use a dedicated transactional or marketing provider.
• Attempt to access accounts, data or systems belonging to anybody else, or probe, scan or test the security of infrastructure without written permission.
• Circumvent rate limits, authentication or any other protective measure.
• Store or serve large archives of media unrelated to the website itself, or use hosting as a general file distribution service.
• Knowingly leave a site running software with a publicly known critical vulnerability after we have told you about it and offered a fix.

4. SEO and marketing

We only carry out search and marketing work that we would be happy to describe to the search engine concerned. We will not buy links from link farms or private blog networks, generate doorway or cloaked pages, scrape and republish other people's content, write fake reviews, or manipulate a competitor's reputation.

If you ask us to do any of this, we will decline and explain why. These techniques risk a manual penalty that costs far more to recover from than the traffic was ever worth.

5. Work we will not take on

Separately from anything unlawful, we choose not to build or market for: adult content, gambling and betting, payday and high-cost short-term lending, essay-writing services, and anything whose business model depends on the customer not understanding what they are buying. This is a commercial choice and we make it politely at the quoting stage.

6. Your responsibilities

• Keep your credentials secure and do not share logins between people.
• Tell us promptly if you believe an account has been compromised.
• Make sure content you supply is lawful and that you hold the rights to it.
• Make sure your own site's terms, privacy policy and cookie handling comply with the law applying to your business.

7. Reporting misuse

If you believe something we host or built breaches this policy, email hello@smartersweb.uk with the URL and a description. We acknowledge reports within two working days. Reports of child sexual abuse material or an immediate threat to life are acted on immediately and referred to the relevant authority.

8. Enforcement

Where we believe this policy has been breached we will normally contact you first, explain the problem and give you a reasonable opportunity to fix it. We may suspend a service immediately and without prior notice where the breach is unlawful, where it creates an active security risk to other users, or where we are legally required to act.

If we suspend a service, we will tell you why and what is needed to restore it. Repeated or serious breaches may lead to termination under our terms of service. Suspension for breach does not entitle you to a refund, but we will always return your data and credentials.

9. Changes

We may update this policy as the law or the threat landscape changes. The date at the top shows the current version, and we will notify active clients by email of any material change.

10. Contacting us

Smarter Web Solutions Limited, 85 Shelbourne Road, London, N17 9YL, United Kingdom. Email hello@smartersweb.uk · Telephone +44 7912 315516.