This Annex forms part of the Cloud Master Services Agreement and describes the scope, responsibilities and limitations relating to the Fair Use Policy.

1. General principles

  1. Cloud Services are designed for typical small and medium-sized business workloads, not for high-volume or specialist workloads (such as massive media streaming, crypto-mining, or large public SaaS platforms), unless explicitly agreed in writing.
  2. The Cloud Platform is generally shared. Your use of shared resources (CPU, RAM, storage I/O, network bandwidth) must not unreasonably degrade performance for others.

2. Normal usage

  1. Normal usage includes workloads such as:
    • line-of-business applications used by your staff;
    • internal or modest-traffic public websites;
    • typical Remote Desktop or Virtual Desktop environments; and
    • standard file and print services.
  2. If you are unsure whether a planned workload is suitable for the Cloud Platform, you should discuss it with us first.

3. Excessive or unreasonable usage

  1. Examples of usage that may be considered excessive or unreasonable include:
    • continuous high CPU or I/O usage from one workload that affects other workloads on the same host or underlying infrastructure;
    • very large or frequent data transfers that significantly exceed typical business usage;
    • running workloads specifically designed to consume as much compute or network capacity as possible; or
    • using a lower-tier plan to run workloads more appropriate for a dedicated or higher-tier service.
  2. If we believe your usage is problematic, we will:
    • review the usage with you;
    • propose configuration changes or an upgrade path if appropriate; and
    • agree reasonable timescales for adjustments.

4. Mitigation

  1. If a workload is causing immediate issues for other customers, other workloads or for the stability of the Cloud Platform, we may need to take temporary measures, such as:
    • rate-limiting certain resources;
    • temporarily suspending a specific service instance; or
    • moving the workload to a different part of the platform where possible.
  2. We will inform you of any such actions as soon as reasonably practical and work with you on a longer-term solution.

5. Upgrades and re-pricing

  1. Where your sustained usage clearly exceeds the capacity or intent of your current plan, we may:
    • recommend an upgrade to a more appropriate service tier; or
    • where no suitable shared plan exists, discuss options for dedicated infrastructure.
  2. If you do not agree to a reasonable upgrade or change, and usage continues to cause issues, we may apply reasonable technical limits or ultimately give notice to end the affected Cloud Service at the end of its term.