DMCA & Copyright Policy
Our position on copyright
HOSTING123 (hosting123.org) publishes original reviews, benchmarks, guides, and screenshots produced by our own team. We take other people’s copyright as seriously as our own, we respond to valid infringement notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and equivalent laws, and this page explains how to send one, what happens next, and how counter-notices work. It also explains how we use third-party material in the first place, because most complaints we could receive are answered by that section.
How we use third-party material
Reviewing a product means showing it. In the course of ordinary editorial work we may include:
- Screenshots of hosting control panels, checkout pages, and dashboards, captured from accounts we paid for, used to document what we tested and to substantiate claims such as pricing at a given date;
- Short quotations from providers’ terms of service, marketing pages, and support replies, quoted for criticism, review, and verification;
- Names and logos of vendors, used to identify the products under discussion.
We consider these uses fair and lawful in the context of review and criticism, and they are never presented as our own creative work. If you believe a specific use on our site goes beyond that, the notice process below is open to you, and we will genuinely consider the complaint rather than reflexively defending the page.
Filing a copyright infringement notice
Send notices to support@hosting123.org with “DMCA” in the subject line. For a notice to be valid and actionable, it must include:
- identification of the copyrighted work you claim is infringed, or a representative list if there are several;
- the exact URL on hosting123.org where the allegedly infringing material appears, plus enough detail for us to find the specific material on the page;
- your name, postal address, telephone number, and email address;
- a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
- a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorised to act for the owner;
- your physical or electronic signature.
Incomplete notices slow everything down: “your site uses our content” with no URL cannot be acted on, and we will write back asking for the missing elements rather than guessing. Please also consider whether the material is a licensed or fair use before filing; knowingly misrepresenting infringement in a DMCA notice can make the sender liable for damages.
What we do with a valid notice
On receiving a complete, valid notice we will review the material promptly, and where the claim holds we will remove or disable access to the material expeditiously and note the removal on the affected page where appropriate. We will inform the person who posted the material, if it came from a contributor or reader submission, and provide them with the substance of the notice so they can respond.
Counter-notices
If material you posted was removed and you believe the removal was a mistake or misidentification, you may send a counter-notice to the same address containing: identification of the removed material and the URL where it appeared; a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification; your name, address, and telephone number; consent to the jurisdiction of the courts competent under the laws applicable where the operator is established, and agreement to accept service of process from the original complainant; and your signature. Where the law provides, material may be restored after a counter-notice unless the original complainant informs us they have filed a court action within the statutory window.
Repeat infringers and our own content
Where the site accepts reader submissions, accounts or contributors who repeatedly infringe copyright lose the ability to submit. In the other direction: our reviews, benchmark data, and original screenshots are our copyright. Short quotations with attribution and a link are welcome; wholesale republication of reviews or scraped copies of benchmark tables are not, and we enforce against them using the same mechanisms described on this page. Licensing questions, including commercial reuse of our comparison data, go to support@hosting123.org.
