Terms and conditions

These terms are the contract between you and Coolhost (Pty) Ltd for hosting, domains, email and the other services we sell on coolhost.co.za and in the client area at my.coolhost.co.za.

Version 1. Published 5 November 2026. They apply to orders placed on or after that date, and to services that renew after that date.

1. How you agree

You agree when you create a client-area account and tick the box that refers to these terms, when you place an order, or when you keep using a service after we have told you that these terms apply. If you order for a company, you confirm that you have authority to bind that company. The company and the person who places the order are both responsible for the charges.

The contract for a particular service is these terms, plus the product description and price shown at checkout, plus the invoice. If a sentence in the product description conflicts with these terms on price, term length or what is included, the checkout record wins. On everything else, these terms win. A written service-level schedule signed by both sides wins over both, but only for the service it names.

We do not accept a purchase order or your own terms unless we sign them. Silence is not acceptance of your terms.

2. Services

We sell website hosting, WordPress hosting, email, domain registration and transfer, SSL certificates, VPS and dedicated servers, and add-ons such as SiteLock and CodeGuard where those products are listed. A guide on the website is information, not a promise that a particular package includes a feature the order form does not list.

Some servers are in South Africa and some product pages state that the server is in the United States. The location on the product page is the location of that service. Content you put on a USA server is stored in the United States. Account, billing and support records are kept on Coolhost systems used to run the client area.

We may refuse an order, or ask for more information before we start, where the order looks fraudulent, where we cannot supply the product, or where the use would break clause 10. If we refuse before we have started, we refund what you paid for that order.

Dates we give for setup are estimates. A domain that is pending at a registry, a transfer that the losing registrar delays, or a server that is out of stock can move the start date. We will tell you when that happens.

3. Your account

You must give a real name, a working email address, and accurate contact details. If you are a company, the company name on the account should match the entity that pays. You must keep the password confidential and tell us promptly if you think someone else has used the account. Until you tell us, orders and messages sent from the account are treated as yours.

We may ask for proof of identity or authority before we release a domain, change a registrant, or pay a refund to a new bank account. That request is there to stop theft of the account. We do not ask for your password by email.

The client area is for customers. Staff tools are not part of the service you buy, and trying to reach them is a breach of clause 10.

4. Price, VAT and renewal

Prices are in South African rand. The invoice states the amount due and any VAT. A price on a marketing page can change before you order. The price that binds us is the price confirmed at checkout or on the invoice we issue for that order.

Promotional prices apply to the period we state, usually the first term. The renewal price is the price in the client area at the time of renewal, unless the order said a different renewal price for a fixed period. We will show the renewal amount on the invoice before the renewal date. If you do not want to renew, cancel before the renewal invoice is due. Cancelling after we have already paid a registry or a certificate authority does not unwind that third-party fee.

Hosting, email and servers renew for the same period you chose (monthly or yearly, or another period the product uses) unless you cancel. Domain renewals follow the registry’s term, usually a year.

5. Payment and suspension

Invoices are due on the date printed on them. Card and instant-EFT payments are processed by PayFast, which receives your payment details under its own terms. We receive the result of the payment and the details we need to allocate it to your invoice. We do not store a full card number on our servers.

If an invoice is unpaid after the due date we may suspend the service. Suspension means the website, email or server stops working for visitors, and you may lose the ability to change DNS, until the invoice is paid. We will email the address on the account before or when we suspend, using the billing address we hold. Email that bounces because you did not update your address still counts as notice.

If a service stays unpaid, we may terminate it. For a domain, termination can mean we do not renew it, or that the registry deletes it after any grace period the registry allows. After deletion, someone else can register the name. We do not promise to recover it.

A suspension or termination for non-payment does not wipe charges already incurred. You still owe the unpaid invoice, and you owe a reasonable fee if a registry charges us a redemption fee because the name expired while the invoice was unpaid and you then ask us to restore it.

6. Consumer rights

If you are a consumer under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008, that Act applies where it cannot be excluded. A juristic person whose asset value or annual turnover is at or above the threshold set by the Minister (R2 million at the date of these terms, unless the Minister has changed it) is outside much of the Act. Nothing in these terms takes away a right the Act, the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002, or the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 gives you and that we are not allowed to limit.

Section 44 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act gives a cooling-off right on some electronic transactions. It does not apply to a service that has already begun with your consent. When you order a domain, hosting, email or a certificate, you ask us to start as soon as we can, including submitting the name to the registry and opening the hosting account. Once that has started, the cooling-off right does not apply to that part of the order. If you want us to wait, say so in writing before you pay, and do not use the service. If we can still stop before a registry or other supplier has been instructed, we will.

Where the Consumer Protection Act’s fixed-term rules apply, you may cancel a fixed-term service on 20 business days’ written notice. We may charge a reasonable cancellation fee, which will not exceed the loss we actually suffer, including a fee a registry or upstream provider will not refund. We may cancel for a material breach that you do not fix within the time we give you in a notice.

Direct marketing: we will not add you to a promotional list unless you opt in, or unless the Consumer Protection Act allows a message to an existing customer about a similar service. Every promotional email has an unsubscribe link. Transactional mail (invoices, password resets, suspension warnings, ticket replies) is part of the contract and is not marketing.

7. Domains

A domain registration is a licence from the registry for a period, not a purchase of the name outright. You are the registrant. You must give registrant details that are true, and you must keep them up to date. False WHOIS details are a ground for the registry to suspend or delete the name, and a ground for us to suspend our services on that name.

.za names are subject to the rules published by the .ZA Domain Name Authority (ZADNA) and the relevant second-level registry. Other extensions are subject to the registry and to ICANN rules where those rules apply. Those rules form part of this contract for the domain they cover. If a registry refuses a registration or transfer, we will tell you and refund the registration fee we have not had to pay over. A fee the registry keeps is not refundable.

WHOIS and RDAP publication follows the registry. For many .za names the registrant’s name and contact details are published. A privacy add-on, where we offer one and the registry allows it, replaces public contact details with a proxy. It does not hide the name from the registry, from a court, or from a competent authority.

Transfers need the auth code and, where the registry requires it, approval from the current registrant. We are not responsible for a delay caused by the other registrar. You must not transfer a name away in order to avoid an unpaid invoice for that name. We may refuse an outbound transfer while an invoice for that domain is overdue, where the registry’s rules allow us to.

After expiry, the registry may hold the name for a grace or redemption period. Redemption prices are set by the registry and are often higher than a normal renewal. If you do not renew or redeem in time, the name drops and we cannot force the registry to give it back.

8. Hosting and servers

Shared and WordPress hosting is a shared system. You must stay inside the disk, bandwidth, inode, email and CPU limits of the package. A site that crowds out other customers can be rate-limited or moved, and we will tell you before we do that unless the load is already taking the server down.

On a VPS or dedicated server you are responsible for what you install, for patches, and for firewall rules, unless the order says we manage those things. Root or administrator access means you can break the server. We will help on a managed product to the extent the product description states. We will not custom-develop your website under a hosting plan.

We may apply security patches, reboot a server, or block a port to stop an active attack. Planned maintenance is announced when we have notice ourselves. Emergency work may happen without advance notice.

We do not promise that a service will be uninterrupted or error-free. Network routes between a visitor and the server are not all under our control.

9. Email

Mailbox storage counts against the package limit. You are responsible for downloading or exporting mail you need to keep. We may filter inbound and outbound mail for spam, malware and obvious abuse. A filter can delay or reject a legitimate message. Tell support if that happens and we will review the filter for that mailbox.

You must not send bulk mail, bought lists, or mail that hides its origin, from Coolhost mail servers. Transactional mail that a normal website sends (order confirmations, password resets for your own users) is allowed if it stays within the package and honours unsubscribe requests where the message is promotional.

Mail you send must comply with the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act and, where the recipients are consumers, the Consumer Protection Act. Complaints about mail sent from your domain can lead us to suspend outbound mail on that domain while we investigate.

10. Acceptable use

You must not use the services, and you must not allow anyone else to use them, for any of the following:

• unlawful content or activity under South African law, including fraud, phishing, and infringement of copyright or a trade mark;
• child sexual abuse material, or any content that sexualises a child. We report this to the South African Police Service and the relevant hotline, and we preserve the account;
• malware, ransomware, botnets, port scanning, or breaking into a system you do not have permission to test;
• spam, or operating an open relay or open proxy;
• hosting material that a court, or a notice that meets the requirements of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, has told us to take down, once we have sent that notice to you and you have not removed it or given us a lawful reason to refuse;
• mining cryptocurrency on shared hosting, or any use that is plainly different from the product you bought and that degrades the platform.

Report abuse to [email protected] with the subject “Abuse”. Include the URL, the time, and any message headers. We may suspend first and ask questions second where the harm is ongoing, and we will tell you what we did and what we need from you to restore the service.

We may preserve logs and disclose them when the law requires it, or when a court or a competent authority asks. We do not hand customer content to a private complainant without a legal basis, except that we may share what we must share with a registry to keep a domain in good standing.

11. Your content

You keep ownership of the files, databases, mail and site content you upload. You give us a licence to host, copy, back up and transmit that content solely so we can provide the service, secure it, and comply with the law. The licence ends when you have deleted the content and any backup cycle that still holds it has expired, except for copies we must keep for a legal claim, a tax record, or an abuse investigation.

You confirm that you have the rights you need in that content, and that it does not breach clause 10. We do not review every site we host. If we become aware of a problem, clause 10 applies.

12. Backups

A backup is included only if the product says so, or if you buy CodeGuard or another backup product. Even then, a backup can fail. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose, and test a restore before you need one.

If we take platform snapshots for our own operations, those snapshots are not a product you can rely on, and we may overwrite them. Ask support for a restore where your product includes one. Restores are done in a reasonable time, not instantly, and a restore can overwrite newer files.

13. Products we resell

SSL certificates are issued by a certificate authority. SiteLock and CodeGuard are supplied by those vendors. We resell them and provide first-line help. The vendor’s technical limits, validation rules and suspension rights apply on top of these terms. If a certificate authority refuses to issue a certificate because the validation details do not match, we will help you correct the details or refund the fee we have not passed on.

Domain registries, PayFast and Cloudflare (which may sit in front of coolhost.co.za) process some data as described in the privacy policy and the privacy notice.

14. Ending a service

You may cancel a renewing service from the client area, or by email to billing from the address on the account, before the next renewal date. Cancellation stops the next renewal. It does not refund the current term, except where clause 6 or a law that we cannot exclude requires a refund.

We may suspend or end a service immediately if you breach clause 10, if we are required to by law or by a registry, or if continuing would put other customers or the platform at serious risk. For other breaches, we will give you a notice and a reasonable chance to fix the breach, unless the breach cannot be fixed.

When a service ends, we may delete the data on it after 14 days, and sooner if the disk has to be reused or if the law says we must delete it. Export what you need before the end date. We do not charge a separate fee to hand you a copy of your website files during those 14 days, if the files are still on the server.

15. Intellectual property

The Coolhost name, logo and the text of our website belong to us or our licensors. You may link to our pages. You may not copy our pages to sell a competing service, and you may not use our marks so that anyone would think you are us.

We grant you a non-exclusive right to use the client area and the software we install for you, for the term of the service. You do not acquire ownership of that software. cPanel, WordPress, and other third-party software stay under their own licences.

16. Personal information

We process personal information as the responsible party under the Protection of Personal Information Act. The details are in the privacy notice, which is the notice we give you when we collect information, and in the privacy policy. The cookie policy explains the cookies and the choice we ask you to make. Those three documents are part of this contract.

17. Liability

We are liable for direct loss that we cause by failing to perform the service with reasonable care and skill, up to the fees you paid us for the affected service in the three months before the event. We are not liable for loss of profits, loss of data where you did not keep your own copy, or loss that was not reasonably foreseeable, except where a law that we cannot contract out of says otherwise.

The cap in the previous paragraph does not apply to death or personal injury caused by our negligence, to fraud, or to gross negligence. It also does not apply to any liability the Consumer Protection Act does not allow us to limit.

You indemnify us against a claim by a third party that arises from your content, your domain, or your breach of clause 10, including a reasonable legal cost. We will tell you about the claim and will not settle it in a way that admits fault on your behalf without talking to you first, unless a court deadline forces us to act.

Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by a fire, flood, power failure outside our control, a cable cut, a registry outage, war, or a similar event, for as long as the event continues. The party affected will tell the other and will try to limit the damage.

18. Law, notices and changes

South African law governs this contract. You and we submit to the courts of the Republic of South Africa. If you are a consumer, you may also use the dispute process the Consumer Protection Act provides, and you may approach the Information Regulator about personal information.

Notices to you go to the email address on the account, and count as received on the next business day unless the message bounces. Notices to us go to [email protected], or by hand to the street address at the top of these terms. A notice about termination or a legal claim should also be sent to [email protected] so it is not missed in a support queue.

We may change these terms. We will email the account address and post the new version on this page at least 15 days before the change applies to a service you already have. If you do not agree, you may cancel the affected service before the change takes effect, and we will not charge a cancellation penalty for that cancellation. A change required by law can take effect sooner, and we will say so.

If a clause is invalid, the rest stays in force. You may not cede the contract without our written consent. We may cede it to a buyer of the business, and we will tell you. This contract is the whole agreement about the services. A failure to enforce a clause once is not a waiver.

Questions about these terms: [email protected].