The AUP in plain English
The acceptable use policy is the binding document. This page explains what it means in practice, which is what most people actually want to know.
Never allowed
No judgement call, no warning, and the one area where we are inflexible:
- Material depicting the sexual abuse of children
- Attacking other networks — floods, booters, amplification sources, scanning at scale
- Spam, and the infrastructure that supports it
- Phishing, malware distribution, command and control, carding and fraud
- Open resolvers, open relays and open proxies, whether deliberate or by accident
- Content that is illegal under Dutch or EU law
These are not negotiable and they are not a matter of warnings. They are also why we are able to keep a clean network, which is ultimately what you are buying.
Fine, but tell us first
Legitimate activities that look exactly like an attack unless we know about them:
- Sending bulk mail, even entirely consented. See port 25 and sending mail.
- Security testing of your own systems, and anything that generates scan-like traffic.
- Very high sustained bandwidth, so we expect it rather than investigate it — see streaming and high-bandwidth delivery.
- Tor exit nodes, VPN services and public proxies. Talk to us first; the abuse volume is the issue, not the technology.
One ticket beforehand turns a potential suspension into a note on your account.
If you host other people's content
You need to be able to act on a complaint, specifically and quickly:
- A published contact point that a human reads
- A way to remove a single item without taking the whole service down
- The ability to act within the deadline when an authority orders removal — one hour for terrorist content under EU rules
Build that before you need it. See copyright complaints and what to do with an abuse notice.
What happens when a complaint arrives
- We forward it to you with a deadline. Most complaints end here.
- If you do not respond, or the issue continues, we escalate.
- For something active and damaging — an outbound attack, a live phishing page — we may null-route or suspend first and tell you immediately afterwards. That is to protect the network and other customers, not a judgement about you.
- Deliberate or repeated breaches end the relationship.
Answering quickly is almost always enough. A customer who replies within the hour and fixes it is in an entirely different position from one who ignores three notices.
Why this benefits you
A provider that tolerates spam and attacks ends up with address space that is blocklisted, badly peered and slow. Enforcing the AUP is how your mail gets delivered and your packets take good paths. See getting off a blocklist for what the alternative costs.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base