Terms of Service

These Terms govern your use of Sapling, operated by Sapling Hosting (ABN 67 258 304 892) in New South Wales, Australia. Creating an account or using the service means you accept them. If you do not, please do not use Sapling.

• You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian must agree to these Terms on your behalf.
• Keep your login secure, and tell us promptly if you think it has been compromised. Two-factor authentication is available and we recommend turning it on.
• You are responsible for what happens on servers you own or co-administer.
• One account per person. To let somebody else help run your server, add them as a CO-ADMIN rather than sharing your login — they get their own account and their own audit trail.

A game server, the control panel around it, and the automation described on this site: nightly backups, game updates, scheduled restarts and the monitoring behind them. Your server runs on hardware we own and operate in Australia.

When you rent a server, you decide who plays on it and what happens there. The people who connect to your server have no account with us and have not agreed to anything with us — so telling them what is recorded is your job, not ours.

In particular: on Rust servers, in-game chat is logged and visible to you for 30 days, and player names, Steam IDs and session history are recorded so you can moderate. Section 6 of our privacy policy sets out exactly what is held. If you run a server here, you agree to make that clear to your players — in your server rules, your Discord, or wherever they would look.

You also agree to moderate your own community. We do not police what happens in your game, but the acceptable use rules below apply to your server regardless of who broke them.

You agree not to use Sapling to:

• Host content or activities that are illegal in Australia or wherever you operate from.
• Attack, scan, probe or otherwise interfere with our infrastructure or another customer's server.
• Run cryptocurrency miners, botnets, proxies, or anything unrelated to game hosting on our infrastructure.
• Host or distribute malware, phishing pages, pirated software, or child sexual abuse material. This is grounds for immediate termination and we will cooperate with law enforcement.
• Resell Sapling services without our written permission.

World saves, configuration, and anything else you upload remain yours. You grant us only the licence needed to run the service: to store, transmit and back up that content. We do not inspect what is on your server except where we must to enforce these Terms or comply with the law.

Sapling makes it straightforward to install mods and plugins — Minecraft mods from Modrinth and CurseForge, Oxide or Carbon plugins on Rust, and the equivalents on other games. We do not write or own any of them and we are not responsible for how they behave. Check that anything you install permits the way you are using it, particularly on a monetised or public server.

We do not install third-party plugin code on your behalf. Where Sapling offers settings for a plugin, it edits the configuration of a plugin you chose to install; the plugin itself is yours.

• Paid plans are billed monthly in advance. There is no annual term.
• You authorise us to charge the payment method on file at each renewal.
• Prices can change, and we will give you at least 30 days' notice before a change affects your plan. A price change never applies retrospectively to a period you have already paid for.
• If something is wrong with a charge, contact us within seven days and we will sort it out. We do not prorate refunds for mid-cycle cancellation on a monthly plan.
• While Sapling is in its pilot, hosting is free. Nothing is charged and no payment method is required. We will give you clear notice by email before that changes, and pilot months are never billed retrospectively.

We chase a failed payment before we act on it, and the timeline is deliberately public so there are no surprises:

• Days 1, 3 and 6 — we email you. Your server keeps running.
• Day 7 — the server is suspended. It stops, but nothing is deleted: your files, worlds and backups are all still there and it comes straight back when the payment goes through.
• Day 30 — a reminder that the account still needs attention.
• After that, a person looks at it. Nothing is terminated automatically by a timer.

We will not destroy a suspended server without a verified off-site copy of it existing first. If that copy cannot be made, nothing is destroyed and a human decides what happens.

You can delete a server yourself from its settings. Doing so stops it and stops billing immediately, but the server is not destroyed for seven days — you can undo it from the same place at any point in that window. After the window closes, the server is destroyed once a verified archive of it exists.

To close your whole account, email us at the address in section 14. We will delete your personal information other than records we must legally keep, such as invoices.

We aim for high uptime and do not promise perfection. Planned maintenance is announced in advance on the status page; unplanned outages are posted there once confirmed. We do not offer credits for short outages except where the law requires it.

Backups are taken nightly and kept for the retention period shown on your server's Backups tab. They are a safety net, not a guarantee — keep your own copy of anything you could not bear to lose. You can download a backup at any time.

We may suspend or terminate an account that:

• Breaks the acceptable use rules above.
• Leaves an invoice unpaid after the process in section 9.
• Puts our infrastructure or other customers at risk.

Except where the law or an immediate risk requires otherwise, we will tell you before we act and give you a chance to put it right.

To the maximum extent the law permits, our total liability for any claim arising from your use of Sapling is limited to what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, including lost profits or data beyond what a backup can restore.

Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law. Our goods and services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded. If we fail to meet one, you may be entitled to a replacement or refund for a major failure, and to compensation for other reasonably foreseeable loss. Where the law allows us to limit our liability for a non-major failure, we limit it to resupplying the service or paying the cost of having it resupplied.

We will update these Terms when we need to, and email you at least 30 days before a material change takes effect. Continuing to use Sapling after that date accepts the new Terms.

These Terms are governed by the laws of New South Wales, Australia, and disputes will be heard there unless consumer protection law where you live requires otherwise.

Questions: [email protected].