At UpTime Web Hosting, we believe in radical transparency. We don't hide behind confusing fine print, and we certainly don't force technical restrictions on you without explaining why they exist.
By default, every account hosted on our Australian infrastructure is protected by our automated security shield. This layer actively filters out web scrapers, malicious bots, and automated connection floods before they ever touch your site code.
However, we operate under a simple promise: Your business, your rules. If you choose to turn off our automated bot protection, we will respect your request. Because removing these defenses alters how your account interacts with our network, we require a signed Waiver and Acknowledgment of Risk first.
Here is an honest breakdown of why we have this policy and what signing the waiver means for your site.
Why We Ask You to Sign a Waiver
When automated bad-bot protection is disabled, your website is left completely open to unrestricted traffic. Web scrapers and malicious bots don't visit a site like a regular human browser; they can send hundreds or thousands of simultaneous requests per second.
Without dynamic rate limiting, this flood of traffic directly hits your database and application resources. We require an official acknowledgment so that everyone is 100% on the same page regarding the potential fallout.
What the Waiver Covers (Key Points)
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1. Total Loss of Uptime Guarantees (SLA Voidance)
If your website goes offline, slows to a crawl, or crashes because web scrapers or bot floods are overloading your database, UpTime cannot be held responsible. Any standard SLA uptime guarantees or uptime credits are rendered void for incidents caused by unmitigated scraper traffic.
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2. Protection of the Local Infrastructure
You have complete freedom over your account, but on shared infrastructure, one account's high resource usage cannot be allowed to degrade server performance for neighboring Australian businesses. If incoming bot traffic threatens the stability of the entire physical server, our automated systems will step in to isolate or temporarily suspend the targeted account to protect the core hardware.
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3. Clear Boundaries on Hands-On Support
If your site drops offline due to a scraper flood and you need our local engineering team to step in, clear hung database queries, or manually block offending IPs to get you back online, that hands-on technical work falls outside standard hosting support and will be billed at our standard technical support hourly rate.
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4. Protection Against Unseen Server Costs
Unrestricted scrapers rapidly consume massive amounts of server memory, CPU workers, and monthly bandwidth. The waiver ensures you accept financial and operational responsibility for the traffic spikes your site attracts once protection is removed.
Can You Turn Protection Back On Later?
Yes, absolutely. If you turn protection off and find that your site is constantly getting overwhelmed by bad bots or suffering performance issues, you can request to re-enable our default security shield at any time.
Simply open a support ticket through your UpTime Client Portal, and our local Brisbane support team will re-apply the security rules to shield your site once again.
