What you can and cannot host

Your server, your responsibility

MacServe gives you a Linux server on your own Mac and carries public traffic to it. What you run on it, what you serve, and what data you collect are entirely yours. The account holder is responsible for everything reachable through their connection, including anything a guest, an employee or an AI assistant puts there.

MacServe does not inspect, moderate, index or back up what you host. We cannot see inside your Linux server. If something you host is unlawful or breaks the rules below, that is on the account holder, not on MacServe.

This page is a plain-language summary of what we expect, not legal advice.

Made for this

Ordinary self-hosting. If it runs on a small Linux server and serves a reasonable amount of traffic, it fits.

• Websites and APIs: personal sites, portfolios, blogs, documentation, side projects, REST and GraphQL APIs, webhooks.
• Web apps and services: full-stack apps, WebSocket services, background jobs, queues and cron work.
• Databases and storage: Postgres, MySQL, Redis, SQLite and similar, for your own applications.
• Home and media: media servers such as Plex or Jellyfin, home automation, personal file sync, dashboards.
• Development: staging environments, preview builds, CI runners, a remote dev box you SSH into.
• Small multiplayer servers: game servers and bots over TCP or UDP for you and people you know.

Not allowed

These end in suspension without notice, and we will cooperate with lawful requests. The list is not exhaustive; the spirit is what matters.

• Anything unlawful: content or activity illegal where you are or where our relays operate. Child sexual abuse material is reported and the account is terminated immediately and permanently.
• Attacking other people: malware, ransomware, phishing or credential-harvesting pages, botnet command and control, denial-of-service tooling, port scanning or intrusion attempts.
• Spam and deception: bulk unsolicited email, SMS or messaging; fake stores, fraudulent payment pages, or impersonating a person or a company.
• Infringement: distributing films, music, games, books or software you do not have the right to distribute.
• Harming individuals: doxxing, harassment campaigns, non-consensual intimate imagery, or publishing someone's personal data without a lawful basis.
• Abusing the network: cryptocurrency mining, open proxies or anonymising exit nodes for third parties, traffic laundering, or reselling MacServe bandwidth as a CDN or proxy service.
• Regulated data without your own controls: MacServe is not a HIPAA, PCI-DSS or comparable compliance environment and signs no such agreement. If you handle regulated data you carry every obligation yourself.

Things people forget

Two rules that are not ours but will still stop you.

• Your internet provider's terms: many home connections prohibit running public servers, or throttle sustained upload. Check your own contract before you rely on this for anything that matters.
• Software licences: the licence of anything you install in Linux is between you and its author. MacServe grants you no rights to third-party software.

Availability is on you too

MacServe has no cloud redundancy and no failover. While your Mac is asleep, shut down or offline, or while your home internet is down, everything you host is unreachable. Nothing restarts your applications for you.

Keep your own backups. Your Linux server and its files live on your Mac; if that disk fails, the data is gone. MacServe does not hold a copy.

If something is wrong

If you believe something hosted through MacServe breaks these rules, tell us with the address and what you saw. We can withdraw public access for a connection; we cannot edit or remove content inside someone's Linux server.

We may suspend an account to stop ongoing harm while we look into a report.