Terms of Service

1. Agreement

These Terms are an agreement between you and PLAYYOURWAYHOSTING (ABN 33 985 231 059), trading as Play Your Way Hosting (“Play Your Way”, “we”, “us”). By creating an account or using our websites (playyourway.com.au and playyourwayhosting.com) and the game-server hosting services, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the service.

Our Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Refund Policy and Service Level Agreement form part of these Terms.

2. Eligibility

You must be 18 years or older to purchase a subscription or to hold the billing account behind one. By subscribing you confirm you meet that requirement.

A person under 18 may hold an account for one purpose only: to accept an invite to someone else’s server and use the panel access that account holder grants them. They must have a parent or guardian’s permission to do so, and the account must not be used to buy a subscription or to store a payment method. The account holder who issued the invite stays responsible for that server and for everything done on it, as set out in section 4.

People under 18 may of course play on a server you host without holding an account with us at all.

We do not currently sell subscriptions to customers in some countries and regions, because of how they tax online services bought from a business overseas. These include the European Union, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, India, South Korea, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Checkout refuses an order from those places.

3. The service

We host game servers: you choose a game and plan, and we provision a server with the resources described on the plan’s pricing page, plus a control panel to manage it (console, files, backups, subusers). Plan specifications, supported games and features may evolve; material reductions to a plan you are subscribed to will not apply until your next renewal, with prior notice.

4. Your account

• Provide accurate account details and keep them current - billing and service emails go to your account address.
• You are responsible for your credentials and for everything done under your account. Two-factor authentication is available and recommended.
• If you grant subusers access to a server, you are responsible for their actions on it - including where a subuser is under 18 (section 2).
• Tell us promptly at support@playyourway.com.au if you suspect unauthorised access.

5. Acceptable use

You must not use the service to:

• host or distribute content that is illegal under Australian law or the law that applies to you, or that infringes anyone’s intellectual property or other rights;
• launch, participate in or facilitate attacks (including DDoS), scanning, or unauthorised access to any system;
• run workloads other than the game server you purchased - including cryptocurrency mining, proxy/VPN exits, or bulk email;
• deliberately abuse shared resources in a way that degrades other customers’ servers;
• bypass or attempt to bypass billing, plan limits, or security measures;
• give your server a name, description or message that is offensive, abusive, hateful or discriminatory, including a server name other players see in a game’s server list;
• resell the service without our written consent.

Mods, plugins and custom configurations are installed at your own risk; outages they cause are excluded from the SLA. We may investigate suspected breaches and act under section 13. If a game’s publisher or a platform holder (such as Sony, for PlayStation 5 servers) tells us a server name is offensive, we may rename the server straight away and act under section 13.

6. Your content

Everything you upload to or generate on your server (worlds, saves, configs, files) remains yours. You grant us the limited licence needed to store, back up and run it, solely to provide the service, and you are responsible for having the rights to whatever you upload. When a server is deleted its files are removed, so keep your own copies of anything you care about - backups are a convenience, not an archival guarantee.

7. Billing and renewals

• Subscriptions are billed in advance on the cycle you choose at checkout: monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or annual.
• Prices are in Australian dollars (AUD), New Zealand dollars (NZD) or US dollars (USD), and checkout shows which before you pay. AUD prices are inclusive of GST where applicable, and in every currency the amount shown at checkout is the total you pay.
• Your account is billed in the currency of its first purchase, and its renewals, upgrades and refunds stay in that currency.
• Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing cycle using your saved payment method, until cancelled. By subscribing you authorise us, via our payment processor, to charge your payment method for each renewal.
• Price changes for an existing subscription take effect from your next renewal, with prior notice by email.
• We email a renewal reminder ahead of each charge: 7 days before a quarterly, semi-annual or annual renewal and 3 days before a monthly one. Your renewal date is always shown on your billing page.

8. Cancellation

You can cancel any subscription at any time from your dashboard - no call or support ticket required. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid period: your server keeps running until then, after which it is suspended and its data is retained while it stays suspended. Section 9 explains when we may eventually delete it. See the Refund Policy for when a payment can be refunded instead.

9. Failed payments, suspension and deletion

If a renewal payment fails, your server enters a short grace period during which it stays online while we retry payment and email you. If payment still fails, the server is suspended and the subscription is cancelled - the server stops running, but your data is retained. Until the server is deleted, you can restore it as it was from your billing page by starting the plan again.

We do not keep suspended data indefinitely. Once a subscription has been cancelled - at the end of its paid period, when it is suspended for a failed payment, or straight away after a refund or a withdrawal - its suspended server is deleted 14 days later, including its files and backups. Before that we email you a warning at the account address, normally a week ahead and again the day before, so you can restore it from your billing page or ask us to keep it. A server is never deleted while a chargeback on it is open. Deletion is permanent, so treat a suspension notice as the point to download anything you want to keep.

10. Refunds

Refunds are governed by our Refund Policy, which includes a full-refund window after each payment, your EU/UK withdrawal rights where they apply, and your Australian Consumer Law rights - which nothing in these Terms limits.

11. Service levels

Our uptime commitment and service credits are set out in the Service Level Agreement. SLA credits are in addition to any remedy the Australian Consumer Law, or the consumer law of your own country, gives you.

12. Reviews and review credit

We may ask you, in your dashboard, to review Play Your Way. If you post a review, this section applies.

• Who can post one: an account holder whose first paid server is at least a day old. One review per account, and per payment card. Our staff and approved affiliate partners can’t post a review that earns credit.
• The credit: 5 dollars in your account’s currency (A$5, NZ$5 or US$5) off your next renewal, given when you post the review, whatever rating you give and whatever you write. It comes off the next renewal of one of your servers automatically; if that renewal is less than the credit, the rest comes off the one after. If you have no active server it waits for one for up to 12 months, then lapses. It has no cash value and can’t be transferred, refunded or swapped for anything else.
• What we publish: your rating, your review and the name you choose (your first name and last initial, a nickname, or “Verified customer”), with the game you host and the month, on our reviews page, tagged as a review that earned a credit. We never edit what you write.
• The review rules: be honest and write about your own experience with us. Don’t post spam or advertising, abuse or hateful language, anyone’s personal details, anything that isn’t about Play Your Way, or anything unlawful such as defamation. We may hide a review that breaks these rules. We never hide or change a review because it is negative, and a hidden review keeps its credit.
• Editing or removing it: you can do either any time from Billing. Editing keeps your credit. Removing takes the review down for good and keeps the credit, and you can’t post another one.
• Fake or duplicate reviews: if a review was not written by a genuine customer about their own experience, or the same person reviewed from more than one account, we may remove it and cancel its credit before it is used. We never charge you to take a credit back.
• Your words: you keep them, and give us a free, non-exclusive licence to show your review on our website with the name you chose for as long as it stays up. If we ever quote it anywhere else, we will say it earned a credit.
• We may change or end this offer for future reviews at any time. Reviews already posted keep their credit.

13. Suspension and termination by us

We may suspend or terminate a server or account for material breach of these Terms (including section 5), for non-payment (section 9), or where required by law. Unless the breach is severe or unlawful, we will warn you first and give you a chance to fix it. If we ever terminate for convenience rather than breach, we will refund the unused portion of your current period. Sections that by nature survive termination (liability, indemnity, governing law) survive.

14. Third-party services and game publishers

The service depends on third parties - our payment processor, our authentication and data providers, our infrastructure providers, and optionally Discord - and their terms apply to their parts of the service. The games you host are licensed by their publishers: you must comply with the applicable game licence, such as the Minecraft EULA for Minecraft servers or Steam’s terms for Steam-distributed games. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by any game publisher.

15. Our intellectual property

The Play Your Way name, logo, website, panel and code are ours or licensed to us; these Terms give you no licence to copy, modify or redistribute them. Your content (section 6) is explicitly excluded from this section.

16. Consumer guarantees, warranties and liability

Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law, or, if you are a consumer in New Zealand, under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 or the Fair Trading Act 1986 - or, if you are a consumer anywhere else, any protection your local law makes mandatory - that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Subject to that: the service is provided “as is”, we do not warrant it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and to the extent permitted by law our liability for any failure is limited, at our option, to resupplying the service or paying the cost of resupply, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss (including lost game progress caused by your own mods or configuration). Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

17. Indemnity

To the extent permitted by law, you indemnify us against claims and costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your content, your breach of these Terms, or your breach of law or third-party rights - except to the extent we caused the loss.

18. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of Queensland, Australia, and the courts of Queensland have jurisdiction over disputes. If you are a consumer outside Australia, this does not deprive you of protections or forums your local law grants you mandatorily.

19. Changes and contact

We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be posted with a new “Last updated” date, and significant changes notified by email or on the site. Your continued use of the service after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms.

Questions about these Terms: support@playyourway.com.au. Copyright or content complaints: the same address with “Content complaint” in the subject.