Perch

Perch Platform — Acceptable Use Policy

Version 1.0 — effective 13/10/2026.

This policy forms part of our Terms of Service. It applies to you, to anyone you give access to your service, and to everything hosted on it. Words defined in the Terms have the same meaning here.

It exists for two reasons: to keep the platform safe and stable for everyone on it, and to let us act quickly when something goes wrong, without a dispute about whether we were entitled to.

1. Content you must not host

You must not use the Service to store, publish, transmit or link to material that:

  • is unlawful under Irish or EU law, or under the law of any country the material is directed at;
  • is child sexual abuse material, or sexualises a child in any way;
  • incites or promotes terrorism, violence, or hatred against a person or group on grounds such as race, colour, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, age, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity;
  • infringes anyone's copyright, trade mark, database right or other intellectual property;
  • is defamatory, harassing, threatening, or an invasion of someone's privacy;
  • is fraudulent, deceptive, or designed to impersonate a person or organisation — including phishing pages, fake login or payment screens, and fake shops;
  • contains malware, ransomware, exploit kits, credential stealers or command-and-control infrastructure; or
  • consists of personal data you have no lawful basis to hold.

2. Conduct that is not allowed

You must not use the Service to:

  • send unsolicited bulk or commercial email, or host material advertised by spam sent elsewhere;
  • attempt to gain unauthorised access to any system, account or data, whether ours or anyone else's;
  • scan, probe or test the security of systems you do not own or have written permission to test;
  • run denial-of-service attacks, or participate in a botnet;
  • mine cryptocurrency, or run distributed computing workloads unrelated to the hosted application;
  • operate open proxies, open mail relays, Tor exit nodes, public VPN endpoints or anonymous file drops;
  • circumvent plan limits, share a single-tenant instance among unrelated organisations, or resell the Service without our written agreement; or
  • do anything that damages the reputation of our IP address ranges or gets them blocklisted.

3. Fair and reasonable resource use

Plans include stated storage, user and resource limits. Beyond those, you must not use the Service in a way that degrades the experience of other customers on shared infrastructure.

If your usage is causing a problem, we will normally contact you first and try to agree a fix — a bigger plan, a configuration change, or moving a workload elsewhere. We will only throttle or restrict a service without prior contact where the impact is severe and immediate.

4. Security of your own instance

You are responsible for what you install and how you configure it. In particular you must:

  • keep credentials secure and use strong, unique passwords;
  • keep any plugins, themes, apps or custom code you install up to date;
  • remove software that is unmaintained or known to be vulnerable; and
  • tell us promptly at support@perchplatform.com if you believe your instance has been compromised.

If your instance is compromised and is attacking others, sending spam or serving malware, we may isolate it immediately to stop the harm, and will work with you to clean it up.

5. Reporting illegal content or a breach of this policy

Anyone — customer or not — can report content hosted by us that they consider illegal or in breach of this policy. This is our notice and action mechanism under Article 16 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (the Digital Services Act).

Send reports to support@perchplatform.com with the subject line "Abuse report".

To let us act on it, please include:

  1. a clear explanation of why you consider the content illegal or in breach of this policy;
  2. the exact URL or URLs, or enough other detail to locate the content;
  3. your name and email address — except for reports concerning child sexual abuse material or certain other offences against children, where you may report anonymously; and
  4. a statement that you believe, in good faith, that the information in your report is accurate and complete.

What happens next. We will send an acknowledgement to the email address you give us. We will assess the report in a timely, diligent, non-arbitrary and objective way, and tell you what we decided and whether any automated means were used in reaching it. A complete notice under point 1 and 2 above is treated as giving us actual knowledge of the content concerned.

If we act against your content, we will give you a clear statement of reasons: what we did and to what content, the facts we relied on, the ground in this policy or in law, whether automated means were used, and how to challenge the decision. You can challenge it by replying to us within six months. We will review it, and if we got it wrong we will reverse it promptly.

You also have the right to complain about our decision to an out-of-court dispute settlement body certified under Article 21 of the Digital Services Act, and to go to court. Our Digital Services Coordinator is Coimisiún na Meán (www.cnam.ie), Ireland's regulator for digital services.

Misuse. We may suspend handling reports from a person or organisation that frequently submits notices that are manifestly unfounded, after warning them.

Serious crime. If we become aware of information giving rise to a suspicion that a criminal offence involving a threat to the life or safety of a person has taken place, is taking place or is likely to, we will inform An Garda Síochána or the relevant authority, as Article 18 of the Digital Services Act requires.

6. Enforcement

Depending on what has happened and how serious it is, we may:

  • ask you to fix the problem within a set time;
  • restrict or remove specific content;
  • throttle or limit your service;
  • suspend your account; or
  • terminate your account under clause 9 of the Terms of Service.

We will use the least disruptive option that addresses the problem, and we will give you notice and a chance to put things right, except where the content is manifestly illegal, where there is an immediate risk to people or to our systems, or where the law requires us to act at once.

Suspension does not entitle you to a refund of fees for the period suspended where the suspension results from your breach of this policy. If your account is terminated, clause 10 of the Terms of Service governs what happens to your data.

7. Changes

We may update this policy as the law or the threats change. The current version is always at https://perchplatform.com/acceptable-use. We will give notice of material changes as set out in clause 15 of the Terms of Service.

Perch Platform Limited, registered in Ireland, company number 801020. Registered office: Middlequarter, Newcastle, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, E91 CD71.