Terms of Service

ByteTunnel is a free Minecraft hosting network run for the community, not a commercial hosting company. These terms are written in plain language on purpose. By joining the network or creating a server, you agree to them.

1. What we provide

ByteTunnel lets you create a personal Minecraft server on our infrastructure at no cost, using the /ps create command. Servers are provisioned automatically and managed through a web panel.

2. Acceptable use

Your server is yours to configure, but a few things aren't allowed:

• Using your server to attack, scan, or disrupt other systems (ours or anyone else's), including running proxies, VPNs, or traffic relays unrelated to Minecraft.
• Hosting or distributing illegal content, malware, or material that violates Mojang/Microsoft's Minecraft End User License Agreement.
• Attempting to bypass resource limits, access other players' servers, or exploit the panel, daemon, or network infrastructure.
• Running non-Minecraft workloads (mining, hosting unrelated websites, etc.) on server resources.

We reserve the right to suspend or delete a server that violates these rules, without notice, at our discretion.

3. Resource limits

Every server currently gets up to 3GB RAM, one full CPU core, and 10GB of disk space. These limits exist because the underlying hardware is shared and finite, and may change over time as the network grows.

Servers with no players online for 15 minutes are automatically stopped to free up resources for others. This does not delete your data, see section 4.

4. Your data, and what "free" actually means

Because this service is free and runs on hardware we pay for out of pocket, we can't offer every guarantee a paid host would. Here's exactly where that matters and where it doesn't:

• No uptime guarantee. The network can go down for maintenance, hardware issues, or provider outages.
• Your server is backed up automatically, every 6 hours, to storage separate from the machine your server actually runs on. This isn't a promise we've made without testing it: we've deliberately destroyed a test server's data and restored it from backup to confirm the process actually works. That said, this still isn't an unconditional guarantee, backups happen periodically, not continuously, so it's still possible to lose the last few hours of changes in a worst-case failure.
• Long-term inactive servers may be archived. If storage on the network gets tight, we free up space by moving the least-recently-used servers, ones untouched for at least 7 days, off to cold storage rather than deleting them outright. If this happens to a server of yours, ask on Discord and we can look at restoring it.

5. Accounts

Your panel account is created automatically the first time you make a server, tied to your Minecraft username. You're responsible for keeping your panel password safe; use /ps resetpassword if you need to change it.

6. Termination

You can delete your own server at any time with /ps delete. We may suspend or terminate access to the network for anyone who violates these terms, at our discretion.

7. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the network evolves. Meaningful changes will be announced on our Discord.

8. Contact

Questions about these terms can be directed to us on Discord.