Report abuse

1How to report it#

Use the report form further down this page. It reaches our support desk and gets a ticket number, so nothing gets lost and you can follow it up.

Submit an abuse report

We deliberately do not publish an abuse mailbox — a published address collects far more spam than reports.

2What to include#

We can only act on a report we can verify, and the single most common reason a report stalls is missing evidence. Please include as much of the following as you have:

• The exact address. The full URL of the page, or the IP address involved — not just the domain name.
• When it happened, including the date, the time and the time zone. South African time is UTC+2; if your logs are in UTC, please say so.
• For spam or phishing email: the full message headers. Not a screenshot, and not just the visible message — the headers are what let us identify the account that sent it. Most mail programs offer this as “Show original”, “View source” or “Show all headers”.
• For an attack or scan: the relevant log lines, with timestamps and your own IP address.
• A short description of what you believe is happening.

Please send evidence as text where you can. Do not attach malware samples.

3Copyright and trade mark complaints#

If material hosted by us infringes your intellectual property, send a takedown notice through the same channel and include, in addition to the above:

• Your full name, physical address, email address and telephone number.
• Identification of the work you own, and the URL of the infringing material.
• A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by you, your agent or the law.
• A statement that the information in your notice is accurate, and that you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them.
• Your signature (an electronic signature is fine).

Incomplete notices slow everything down, so please include all of it. We may pass your notice, including your contact details, to the customer concerned so they can respond.

4What happens next#

1. We acknowledge your report and give it a ticket number.
2. We investigate and confirm what is actually happening. Reports are sometimes mistaken — a shared IP address, a forged sender, or a site that was cleaned up hours ago.
3. Where the problem is real, we contact the customer and give them a chance to fix it. Most cases end here, usually with a compromised site being cleaned up.
4. Where the problem is severe or urgent — phishing, malware being served to visitors, an active attack, or child sexual abuse material — we suspend or remove it immediately, without waiting.
5. We come back to you with the outcome.

We aim to look at every report on the same business day. We cannot always tell you the details of what action was taken against a specific customer, but we will tell you whether the matter was resolved.

5Reporting something urgent#

If a website is actively serving malware or phishing to the public, say so clearly at the top of your report. If someone is in immediate danger, or the matter involves child sexual abuse material, please also contact your local police. We report such material to the authorities ourselves.

6What this page is not for#

To keep abuse reports moving, please use the right channel for everything else:

• A problem with your own BPHOST service — use support, or check the network status page.
• Billing questions — your client area.
• Spam you received that did not come from our network — report it to the sending provider. The headers will show who that is.
• A dispute with a website owner about the content of their site — we host websites, we do not adjudicate disagreements. Contact the site owner or seek legal advice.

7Privacy#

We treat reports confidentially, but we may need to share the substance of a report — and, for copyright notices, your contact details — with the customer concerned so they can respond, or with the authorities where the law requires it. See our Privacy Policy.