Guidelines for this section

[Dutchman101]

Note: Please don't create any topics in this section that are not advertising an hosting company/service. Only representatives or providers of said company or service are permitted to post.

Regulations for the "Hosting solutions" section

In order to make sure the hosting services advertised within this section meet the expectations of our userbase, we would like to introduce regulations to guarantee the relevance of ads to our typical audience. We have noticed that a lot of general hosting services, which are not necessarily aimed at MTA-related services, are being posted by commercial parties from around the globe considering it an easy, generic advertisement channel.

To deter this, we will from now on require you to specify in your topic what exactly makes you a suitable hoster for MTA servers or related services that MTA server owners may find interesting. Our forums are not a general webmaster/hosting community, so you must link each service to some sort of usability for MTA. This means for example, that MTA server hosting is to be served by VPS or dedicated servers, for which you should motivate what makes you a suitable gameserver hoster as company/datacenter, instead of just copying a scheme or template from your business' usual offerings. If you are a business and decide to post here, then you should be aware that hosting services/plans your company is offering are able to meet the typical requirements of gameserver hosting.

Likewise, webhosting services are most often marketed for general purposes and are the most common type of service. We do not want to see generalized offers for these that encourage readers to use it for general purpose or their personal websites (like if we were a webmaster forum), but we require you to set apart the usage of these plans by for example aiming such services directly on the upkeep of MTA server communities/their forums. It's not allowed to post advertisement topics just offering webhosting, as the bigger picture must profile you as a company that focuses merely on MTA server hosting or closely related services, with possibly additional MTA-aimed webhosting.

 

A. Posting guidelines:

Your topic must consist of at least 3 parts, including:

1) an introduction of yourself/the company you represent, describing what attracts you to MTA hosting, and what distinguishes you in the gameserver hosting field

2) a proper plans and pricing scheme in the topic itself (or alternatively a link to its source) and advice for/information on the suitability for each plan for what purpose

3) an indication whether your servers are professionally hosted (like in a datacenter/reselled) or if you are just hosting them yourself and are not a company

 

If you represent a company, you should also mention the chamber of trade or business registration number (or similar, based on your respective country's laws) and this should be reflected accurately on the website listed.

To reduce the risk of scams/improper portrayal of a (perhaps well-established) business you are not really an employee of, you are also not allowed to request or encourage potential customers to make the service payments outside of the appropriately mentioned official company website or ordering channel (like requesting payment by forum PM while you listed a website to offer your hosting packages through). This guideline is only applicable if you did in fact add an alleged official website to the advertisement topic or if you're actively marketing yourself off as a company which usually has a known website where orders are managed through.

 

B. Additional posting regulations:

1) Your post should be in English, or consist of multiple languages but with the English version at the beginning.

2) If you want to advertise hosting services in another language, then you should use the Other Languages boards; they often have their own subforum for hosting solutions. If they don't, you can post in the general or server section there, unless its moderators decide otherwise. Any non-english topics made in this section are subjected to a move or removal.

The moderators of other language boards furthermore decide the lenghts they want to enforce this general policy as is this topic that you're reading, they can enforce it even despite the lack of a (translated) copy of it in their section or use it as a guideline to base their decisions off. We encourage moderators of other languages boards that receive regular hosting services ads to translate these regulations, adopt them, or set apart their own regulations.

3) You're not allowed to request full ('real') names or other sensitive personal data of anyone in the topic or through PM. If you're a company, you can do so on your own private platforms (such as customer account or entry, billing), just not in public within the topic. If you're not a company, then please don't request full name or any form of personal documents at all. We have seen too many incidences of dangerous use of privacy-sensitive information.

Additionally, if you offer "free" server hosting and ignore this guideline and still request (extensive) personal details, and (contrary to the guideline for businesses) even if this happens on your own platform environment/site, your topic may get instantly deleted without warning or notification. Anyone with knownledge of this practise happening with free hosting should notify us with a report immediately.

Besides that, offering "free" hosting requires you to either be a notable community member (not a new account, and have significant amount of posts and good reputation) or a company that has a reasonably explainable scheme behind it being "free" (as nothing is really free).

 

Failure to meet requirements listed in this topic may lead to a removal of the offer topic from our forums, or notification with a given timeframe to correct it.

If you happen to stumble upon offers that do not fullfill these requirements and haven't been noticed by a Moderator yet, then we'd appreciate your help by reporting the post using the report function.

 

If you are browsing this forum section, then please proceed with caution when something appears to be too good to be true. For example, if someone is offering 'free' MTA server hosting, there is a wide array or risks to watch out for (and make thumb rules for). Examples:

- Barely anything is really free, you may be surprised by hidden terms or intentions such as hosting providers being interested in stealing your gamemode scripts, or taking control of your server in an illicit fashion if it becomes popular enough.

- Take caution providing your sensitive personal data. In the past, some free hosting providers were mainly interested in collection of private, sensitive information. To help protect you, we have recently implemented the anti-data collection policy that applies to providers of free hosting. Even in the case of paid hosting (or any other outlet), always consider the information you're giving out and the risk of identity theft/fraud. All we can do is advise and inform you to our best abilities, take caution and be careful, proceed on your own risk. We advise that you verify the business entity you're dealing with before contracting any kind of hosting provider.

[Dutchman101]

Following internal review, these regulations have been updated to include safeguards for user privacy (data collection policy for hosters and a specific policy for free hosters) and safe practise advise/warnings for users. Starting today, all hosting providers will have to comply with the updated regulations.