Fair usage policy
Last updated
Written from how the product actually works, and not yet reviewed by a lawyer. If anything here is wrong or unclear, tell us at help@pressypress.com and we will fix it.
Most fair-usage policies exist to take back what the pricing page promised. This one has less to do, because the numbers that decide whether your site stays up are already printed on the pricing page and enforced on your own container.
This page is about the few things we did not put a number on, and about what a Pressy is for. It forms part of the terms.
1. What is already a number, and is not fair usage
Every one of these is published per plan, applies to your site alone, and is measured live on your dashboard’s Health panel:
- Where the limit comes from
- Your plan. Shown against live use on the Health panel
- Where the limit comes from
- Your plan, plus any you have added
- Where the limit comes from
- Your plan's 10 GB, plus any 5 GB units you have added
- Where the limit comes from
- Your plan
- Where the limit comes from
- Your plan
- Where the limit comes from
- Your plan
- Where the limit comes from
- Rises with the storage you buy
Memory
vCPU
Storage
Disk IOPS
Disk throughput
Processes
Files
| What | Where the limit comes from |
|---|---|
| Memory | Your plan. Shown against live use on the Health panel |
| vCPU | Your plan, plus any you have added |
| Storage | Your plan's 10 GB, plus any 5 GB units you have added |
| Disk IOPS | Your plan |
| Disk throughput | Your plan |
| Processes | Your plan |
| Files | Rises with the storage you buy |
Reaching one of these is not a breach of anything. It is the plan working as described: your site slows down, or a write fails, and the Health panel says which number you are against. Nobody gets an email from us about it, nothing is suspended, and no charge appears. The answer is a bigger Pressy or a lighter site, and both are yours to choose.
They also apply to one website. A shared plan’s figures are shared with every other site on the account, which is the difference this policy is short because of.
2. What is unmetered, and where we get in touch
Unmetered means we do not count it against you, do not charge for it by the unit, and do not cut it off at a threshold. It does not mean infinite, so here is the figure where a conversation starts.
- Fair usage
- 500 GB a month, per Pressy
- What happens at it
- We email you. Your site keeps serving while we work out whether you need a bigger Pressy or something is being hotlinked
- Fair usage
- As many as your site needs
- What happens at it
- Nothing, unless they are serving software that is not on that Pressy
- Fair usage
- As many as the people working on your site
- What happens at it
- Nothing. They are accounts for humans, not a distribution channel
- Fair usage
- As many as you own
- What happens at it
- Nothing, unless they point at content the terms already forbid
- Fair usage
- Free and unlimited
- What happens at it
- Nothing. Restoring is the feature
- Fair usage
- Up to 1 an hour
- What happens at it
- The next one waits. This is a rate, not a quota, and it is enforced rather than policed
Bandwidth
Databases
SFTP accounts
Custom domains
Restores
Manual backups
| What | Fair usage | What happens at it |
|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 500 GB a month, per Pressy | We email you. Your site keeps serving while we work out whether you need a bigger Pressy or something is being hotlinked |
| Databases | As many as your site needs | Nothing, unless they are serving software that is not on that Pressy |
| SFTP accounts | As many as the people working on your site | Nothing. They are accounts for humans, not a distribution channel |
| Custom domains | As many as you own | Nothing, unless they point at content the terms already forbid |
| Restores | Free and unlimited | Nothing. Restoring is the feature |
| Manual backups | Up to 1 an hour | The next one waits. This is a rate, not a quota, and it is enforced rather than policed |
You can check the bandwidth figure yourself before we ever mention it: your Pressy’s dashboard shows what it has served over the last 30 days, which is the same measurement this number refers to.
3. What a Pressy is for
A Pressy is a container built to run one WordPress site. Everything below is a use of that container as something else — each one is either a way of turning our unmetered bandwidth into someone else’s product, or a way of getting our address ranges blocked for every other customer.
- Storage for its own sake. File lockers, media dumps, archives and backup targets for things hosted elsewhere. If the files are not served by the site, it is not a website.
- Serving files for somebody else’s site. Using a Pressy as a CDN or image host for a site hosted somewhere else — bandwidth we do not meter, spent on a site we do not run.
- Bulk or automated email. We do not sell email hosting, and a WordPress install sending campaigns is the fastest way to get a mail server blacklisted. Use a mail provider; your contact form is fine.
- Proxies, VPN exit nodes, Tor relays, tunnels. Traffic that arrives at us and leaves for somewhere else, under our IP address and our reputation.
- Cryptocurrency mining, and anything else whose purpose is to consume CPU. Including in a visitor’s browser without their knowledge.
- Torrent clients, seedboxes and public trackers.
- Attacking, scanning, load-testing or overloading anyone else’s systems — including load-testing your own site against a target you do not own, and including command-and-control for anything.
- Malware, phishing, and content built to deceive. Already in the terms, repeated here because it is the one that gets a site switched off without the notice period below.
Load-testing your own Pressy is allowed and we would rather you did it before launch than after. Tell us first if it will be sustained, so we do not read it as an attack and act on it.
4. MiniPressy is held to a tighter line
The free tier is free, and its ceilings are meant to be reachable — a MiniPressy that outgrows itself is the product working. Its published limits are 512 MB of memory, 0.5 vCPU, 1 GB SSD, and unlike a paid Pressy it also has a page-view ceiling of 25,000 a month, shown on its own dashboard. Bandwidth fair usage is 50 GB a month rather than 500 GB.
One MiniPressy per person, and opening more accounts to get more of them is the one thing here we treat as deliberate. Every other limit on this page is something a growing site walks into by accident, and we act accordingly. Signing up repeatedly to avoid paying is not an accident, and those accounts are closed rather than warned.
Moving up to a paid Pressy takes your site with it, and there is no route back down.
5. What happens, in order
For anything that is not actively hurting somebody, you hear from us before anything happens to your site:
- We email you, with the number, what it is measured over, and what appears to be causing it. Your site keeps running.
- You have 7 days to change something, move up a plan, or tell us why the figure is legitimate. Often it is, and then we adjust the number rather than your site.
- If nothing changes, we suspend the site — it stops serving, and every file, database and backup stays exactly where it is. Suspension is reversible on the day the cause is.
- Deletion is last, follows the notice period in the terms, and never happens the same week as the first email.
The exception, stated plainly: if a Pressy is actively harming other customers, our infrastructure or somebody on the internet, we suspend it first and email you the same day. A compromised site sending phishing is the usual case, and the hour spent waiting for a reply is an hour it spends doing damage in your name. We would always rather help you clean it than switch it off, and that is what the email will offer.
6. What we will not do
- Bill you for going over something. There is no overage charge anywhere in this product, because there is no meter that can run over into an invoice. Every limit is a ceiling you can see, not a tap that keeps running.
- Throttle your site without saying so. The ceilings on your plan are the only thing that slows a Pressy down, and they are printed on the pricing page and measured on your dashboard.
- Suspend a site over a figure you were never shown. If we ever need a number that is not on this page, it goes on this page first.
- Delete anything without notice — except where the law requires it of us, which is a narrow set of cases and none of them is a resource limit.
If you think we have got a call wrong, reply to the email. A person reads it.