Terms of service
Who these terms are between
They are between you, meaning whoever holds the account or buys the service, and Devcity, registered in the Republic of Maldives under number SP14842022. Using this site, opening an account or buying anything from us means you accept them.
If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you are confirming you are allowed to.
Your account
- Give us details that are true, and keep them current. We send renewal notices and service warnings to the email address on the account, and an address that stopped working is not a defence against a service lapsing.
- Your password and your two factor codes are yours to protect. Anything done with them counts as done by you.
- Tell us as soon as you think someone else has got into your account.
- One person or company per account. Do not share a login with people who should have their own.
Paying for things
Prices are shown in Maldivian rufiyaa and, unless a page says otherwise, are billed annually in advance. GST is added where it applies.
- Payment is by bank transfer. You place the order, you transfer the money, and you tell us you have. There is no card payment on this site.
- A person approves every payment. Nothing switches on automatically the moment a transfer lands, so allow us a working day. If something is urgent, say so.
- An order is not a service. Until we have confirmed your payment and provisioned the service, you have an order and not a running mailbox or website.
- If a transfer never arrives, the order lapses and nothing is provisioned.
Renewals, and what happens if you do not renew
Services run for the term you paid for and do not renew themselves, because we do not hold a card to charge. We will remind you before your term ends, and again after, and renewing is a payment you choose to make.
- Nothing is switched off by a timer. If a term lapses, a person decides what happens and when, after trying to reach you. Your site does not vanish at midnight on the expiry date.
- Nothing is deleted by a timer either. Where a service does end, your files and your mail are not destroyed automatically. Removal is a decision a person takes, and we check we can still restore what we are about to remove before we remove it.
- Domains are the exception, and the hard one. A domain that reaches its expiry date is governed by the registry, not by us. Once it lapses it can be taken by anybody, and recovering it may be expensive or plainly impossible. Renew a domain on time.
Refunds
We do not run an automatic refund process. If something has gone wrong, write to us and we will sort it out case by case, and refund by bank transfer where a refund is the right answer.
Domain registrations and renewals cannot be refunded. The money leaves us the moment a name is registered and the registry does not give it back. That is true even if you registered the wrong name by mistake, so check spelling before you confirm.
What you may not do with our servers
Everything we host shares a machine with somebody else's business, and one abusive account damages every other. So, plainly:
- No spam, no bulk mail to people who did not ask for it, and no using our mail service to send either.
- No content that is illegal in the Maldives, and nothing that exploits or endangers a child.
- No attacking anybody, from our servers or through them, and no running scans, floods or intrusion attempts.
- No phishing, no malware, and no pretending to be a bank, a government or anybody else.
- No mining cryptocurrency, and nothing else that quietly consumes a whole server.
- No reselling our hosting as if it were yours unless we have agreed to it in writing.
Sending limits apply to every mailbox on our mail service, free and paid alike, and they exist to stop one compromised password getting the whole server blocked by the world's mail providers. The current limits are shown on the Devcity Mail page.
If an account is actively harming the server or somebody else, we will suspend it immediately and talk to you afterwards. That is the one case where we act first. For everything else we ask you to fix it before we do anything.
Your content stays yours
Your website, your files, your databases and your mail belong to you. We claim no ownership of any of it. We hold it in order to serve it, back it up and restore it when you ask, and for nothing else.
You are responsible for what you put on our servers, including that you have the right to put it there.
Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. We do take backups, and on paid mail plans we take them nightly, but a backup is a safety net and not a promise. It is your data.
Software licences
- A licence lets you use the product, on the number of installations you bought. It does not transfer ownership of the software to you.
- Do not share, resell or publish a licence key. Keys check in with our licence server, and a key that appears in more places than it was sold for is suspended.
- Do not attempt to defeat the licence check, and do not redistribute the product with the check removed.
- Support and updates run for as long as your licence does.
What support covers
We look after the things we run: the server, the mail service, the network, and the products we sold you. We will happily point you in the right direction on other things, but building your website, writing your content, fixing code you or somebody else wrote, and recovering a password to a service that is not ours are separate work, and we will quote for them rather than pretend they are support.
Uptime, and the honest version of it
We work to keep everything running and we watch it daily. We do not sell an uptime guarantee with money attached to it, and we would rather say so here than bury a number in a clause we do not intend to honour. Maintenance that will interrupt a service is announced in advance where we can foresee it.
Where our responsibility ends
We are liable to you for the money you paid us for the affected service in the twelve months before the problem, and not for more than that. We are not liable for business you lost, profits you did not make, or data you did not keep a copy of.
Nothing here limits liability for anything the law does not allow us to limit, including our own fraud.
Services depend on things outside our control, including the registries, the upstream networks, and the mail providers who decide whether to accept a message. We cannot promise the behaviour of somebody else's system.
Ending the arrangement
You can stop using a service at any time, and you can ask us to close it. We may close an account that breaks these terms, that is being used to harm somebody, or that has gone unpaid after we have tried to reach you.
Ask us for a copy of your data before you go and we will give you one. Do not leave it until after the account is closed.
Privacy
What we hold about you, and what we do with it, is set out in our privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.
Terms for individual products
Some products add terms of their own:
Changes, and which law applies
We may change these terms. When we do we will move the date at the top, and where a change materially affects what you bought we will tell you before it takes effect. Carrying on using the service after that means you accept the new version.
These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of Maldives, and the courts of the Maldives are where any dispute is settled. We would much rather settle it by talking to you first, and in practice that is what happens.