Privacy Policy

GDPR / Privacy Policy

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use any of our services Safehosts.co.uk

Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any of our products or services that have a separate privacy policy.

Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so–for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.

We collect information in three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depends on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:

  • Basic Account Information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a Safehosts service to provide company and contact details–and that’s it. You may provide us with more information but we don’t require that information to create an account.
  • Public Profile Information: We do not make any of your information public.
  • Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy something from us–a subscription to a Safehosts service, for example–you will provide additional personal and payment information that is required to process the transaction and your payment, such as your name, credit card information, and contact information.
  • Credentials: Depending on the Services you use, you may provide us with credentials for your website (like SSH, RDP, and SFTP username and password). For example, users may provide us with these credentials in order to allow our hands staff to access their equipment during an emergency.
  • Communications With Us: You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our staff about a support question, or post a question about your site in our public forums.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

  • Log Information: Like most internet service providers, we only collect netflow data.
  • Information from Cookies & Other Technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. Safehosts uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads.

How And Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

  • To provide our Services–for example, to set up and maintain your account, host your equipment, or charge you for any of our paid Services;
  • To further develop and improve our Services;
  • To monitor and analyse trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use;
  • To measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition–for example, we may analyze how many individuals purchased a plan after receiving a marketing message or the features used by those who continue to use our Services after a certain length of time;
  • To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of Safehosts and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services;
  • To communicate with you, for example through an email, about offers and promotions offered by Safehosts and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on Safehosts and our products; and
  • To personalize your experience using our Services, provide content recommendations, target our marketing messages to groups of our users (for example, those who have a particular plan with us or have been our user for a certain length of time), and serve relevant advertisements.

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:

(1) The use is necessary in order to fulfil our commitments to you under our Terms of Service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account; or

(2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or

(3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or

(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information–for example, to provide and update our Services, to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience, to safeguard our Services, to communicate with you, to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition, to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, and to personalise your experience; or

(5) You have given us your consent–for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyse them later on.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We do not sell our users’ private personal information.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

  • Subsidiaries, Employees, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries, employees, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.
  • Third Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyse fraudulent payment transactions, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
  • Legal Requests: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
  • To Protect Rights, Property, and Others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Safehosts, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
  • Business Transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that Safehosts goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
  • With Your Consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties with which you authorise us to do so, such as service providers connecting your office to our network.
  • Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our services.
  • Published Support Requests: And if you send us a request (for example, via a support email or one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it–which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information–and we are not legally required to continue to keep it.

For example, we keep netflow data that records information about a visitor to one of Safehosts’s websites, such as the visitor’s IP address, connection type, and traffic flow, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyse traffic to Safehosts’s network and investigate issues if something goes wrong.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorised access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

  • Opt-Out of Electronic Communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional messages from us. Just follow the instructions in those messages. If you opt out of promotional messages, we may still send you other messages, like those about your account and legal notices.
  • Set Your Browser to Reject Cookies: At this time, Safehosts does not respond to “do not track” signals on some of our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using Safehosts’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Safehosts’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
  • Close Your Account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our Services, you can give notice according to your contract. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above–for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

  • Request access to your personal data;
  • Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
  • Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
  • Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
  • Request portability of your personal data.

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to How to Reach Us to, well, find out how to reach us.

EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

Controllers and Responsible Companies

Safehosts are the controller of personal information, which means that they are the company responsible for processing that information, based on the particular service and the location of the individual using our Services.

Depending on the Services you use, more than one company may be the controller of your personal data. Generally, the “controller” is the company that entered into the contract with you under the Terms of Service for the product or service you use.

The chart below explains the controllers for processing your personal information.

Registered Business Address SHILLP #OC308455 Royal Mews, St. Georges Place, Cheltenham, England, GL50 3PQ
Datacentre Address Safehosts Saxon House, Saxon Way, Cheltenham, England, GL52 6QX
   

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please get in touch.

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Safehosts may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Safehosts encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or the Safehosts blog, or sending you a notification through email or your dashboard). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

That’s it! Thanks for reading.

Change log

  • December, 2018: Revised and reorganized language throughout to help simplify the policy and clarify our practices.
  • June, 2018: Added information to reflect the requirements of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.