Terms of service

These terms are an agreement between you and CNAME Solutions ("cname.cloud", "we", "us"), which operates the cname.cloud service and website. By creating an account, buying credits or routing traffic through cname.cloud, you agree to these terms and to our privacy policy. If you use cname.cloud for an organization, you confirm you can bind it to these terms.

1. The service

cname.cloud is a network edge that accepts TCP and TLS connections for hostnames you register and forwards them to backends you choose. We route TLS traffic by the hostname in the TLS handshake and do not decrypt it. Plain HTTP requests are redirected to HTTPS, except Let's Encrypt HTTP-01 challenge requests, which we forward to your backend. The service routes only to backends reachable from the public internet.

2. Your account and domains

• Accounts are subject to approval. We may decline or delay any request for an account or hostname, at our discretion.
• You must give accurate account information and keep your login details secure. You are responsible for activity on your account.
• You may only register hostnames you own or are authorized to use. We verify control with a DNS TXT record: after your account is approved, the token is shown when you open the hostname's cname.cloud address. We may remove a hostname if verification fails or the domain changes hands.
• You must be at least 18, or the age of majority where you live, to open an account.

3. Free tier

The free tier currently includes 100 GB of egress each month, one root domain and its subdomains, and five health checks run every minute at a standard check size, as described on our pricing page. One free tier is allowed per person or organization; creating extra accounts to get more free usage is not allowed. When a month's free egress is used up, your hostnames switch to DNS routing (section 4) until the next month.

Free-tier features are not guaranteed. We may change, limit or discontinue any part of the free tier at any time, with or without notice.

4. Pricing, credits and billing

• Paid usage is billed at the rates on our pricing page, currently $0.20 per GB of egress, from the first gigabyte. Egress means data your backends send through cname.cloud to whatever connects to them, including browsers, applications and your own servers. Ingress, meaning data sent through cname.cloud to your backends, is free.
• Health monitors are unlimited, but the bandwidth they use is billed as egress.
• Paid usage is prepaid with credits. The minimum purchase is $5. Usage is deducted from your balance as it happens.
• When your free allowance and credits are used up, we stop proxying your traffic and switch your hostnames to DNS routing: our DNS answers with the address of a backend that passes its health checks, and clients connect to it directly. Proxying resumes when you add credits or your free allowance resets. While DNS routing is active, failover depends on DNS caches expiring, so clients may keep reaching a failed backend for a while; your backend addresses are visible in DNS; and our edge does not sit in front of your backends. We are not responsible for downtime or exposure caused by DNS routing.
• Credits do not expire while your account is open. Credits are non-refundable, except where the law requires otherwise, and have no cash value.
• Prices exclude taxes, which we will add where required.
• We may change paid prices with at least 30 days' notice by email or on our website. Changes do not affect credits already used.

5. Acceptable use

You may not use cname.cloud, or let anyone use it through your account, for any of the following. This applies to everything reachable through hostnames on your account, whether you run it or your users do.

• Illegal activity of any kind, under the laws that apply to you, your users or us.
• Tor and anonymizing services: Tor relays, exit nodes, bridges or onion services; open proxies; or VPN, proxy or anonymizing services offered to other people.
• Adult content: pornography or other sexually explicit material, or sexual services.
• Child sexual abuse material, or any content that sexualizes minors. We report it to the authorities.
• Copyright and trademark infringement: piracy, unlicensed streaming or IPTV, torrent trackers or indexes, or counterfeit goods.
• Malicious activity: malware, botnet command-and-control, phishing, fraud, scams, spam, or cryptojacking.
• Attacks: launching or relaying denial-of-service attacks, scanning networks, or trying to break into any system, including ours.
• Regulated or high-risk goods and services: gambling, illegal drugs, weapons or explosives, or anything that needs a license you do not hold.
• Harmful content: harassment, threats, doxxing, hate speech, terrorism or violent extremism.
• Sanctions: use by, or for the benefit of, anyone in a sanctioned country or on a government sanctions list.
• Evading our rules: hiding the origin of abusive traffic, routing hostnames you do not control, getting around usage limits or billing, or opening multiple free accounts.
• Anything else we decide, at our sole discretion, exposes cname.cloud to legal, regulatory or reputational risk.

We do not monitor the contents of your traffic, but we act on reports and on what connection metadata shows. Report abuse, including copyright complaints, to [email protected].

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate any account, hostname or traffic, immediately and without notice, if we believe it violates these terms. Credits on an account closed for a violation are forfeited.

6. Your traffic and data

You keep all rights to the content you send through cname.cloud. We do not decrypt TLS traffic and do not inspect the contents of what we route. To run, bill and secure the service, we process connection metadata such as hostnames, IP addresses, ports, timing and byte counts, as described in our privacy policy. You are responsible for your backends, your certificates and the content you serve, and for having the rights and consents that content requires.

7. Availability

We work to keep cname.cloud fast and available, but we do not offer a service-level agreement. The service may be interrupted for maintenance, upgrades, outages at our providers, or reasons outside our control. Health checks and failover reduce the impact of backend failures but cannot guarantee your service stays up.

8. Suspension and termination

You can close your account at any time. We may suspend or close your account, immediately and without notice, if you violate these terms (including the acceptable use rules in section 5), do not pay, or create risk or legal exposure for us or others. We may also stop offering the service. When an account closes, routing for its hostnames stops. If we close your account without cause, we will refund unused purchased credits.

9. Disclaimers

The service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure.

10. Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, or $50 if greater. Some places do not allow these limits, so they may not fully apply to you.

11. Indemnity

You will defend and indemnify us against third-party claims arising from your traffic, your content, your hostnames or your breach of these terms, and pay resulting reasonable costs, including legal fees.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. For material changes, we will give at least 30 days' notice by email or on our website before they take effect. Continuing to use cname.cloud after that means you accept the new terms.

13. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the United States of America, excluding conflict-of-law rules. Disputes will be resolved in the courts of the United States, unless the law where you live gives you the right to bring them elsewhere.

14. General

These terms, the pricing page and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about the service. If any part is unenforceable, the rest still applies. Not enforcing a right is not a waiver of it. You may not transfer these terms without our consent; we may transfer them as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of assets.

15. Contact

Questions about these terms: [email protected].