Terms of Service

Who we are

Namestead (“we”, “us”) gives people a free subdomain, such as yourname.devportfolio.com, on domains the community funds. It is run by Sushil Kumar, an individual in India. Namestead is an independently operated project owned and maintained by Sushil Kumar. It is not a registered nonprofit, NGO, charitable trust, society or Section 8 company.

Namestead is an intermediary under the Information Technology Act, 2000: we host and route names that you point at content you control. These Terms, the Privacy Policy and the other policy pages are our published rules, regulations and user agreement under Rule 3(1)(a) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.

Who can use it

You must be at least 18 years old. Indian law requires a parent’s verifiable consent before a person under 18’s data is processed, and we do not have a way to collect it. If you are under 18, please do not sign up.

You may not use Namestead if we have banned your account, or if the law forbids you from using it.

Your account

• You sign in with GitHub, Google or an email link. You are responsible for what happens under your account, so keep your sign-in methods secure.
• Give us true information. Do not pretend to be another person or organisation.
• One person, one account. Do not create accounts to get around a limit, a vote count or a ban.
• You can export your data or delete your account at any time from Settings. Deleting needs a sign-in from the last 10 minutes.

Names (subdomains)

• Names are free. A name is a right to use an address while you follow these Terms. It is not property, you cannot sell or transfer it, and it gives you no rights in the domain it sits under.
• A name is one label with no dots, and it must pass our name rules: length, allowed characters, reserved words, and a check against well-known brands and confusable look-alikes. We may refuse or remove a name that fails them, whoever asked first.
• How many names and which modes you can use depends on your trust tier (see Trust Points below). We never take a name you already hold away because your tier falls, except that a proxy name you can no longer use is parked after a seven-day notice.
• A name you release, or that is suspended, rests for 90 days before anyone can claim it, so it cannot be sniped.
• Pointing a name at a live server (proxy mode) needs you to prove you control that server. We never connect to private or internal addresses.

If we ever retire a catalog domain we will give at least 12 months’ notice, keep permanent redirects for another 12 months, email everyone affected, and let them move to another catalog domain with their name reserved.

What you may not do

You are responsible for everything your name points to. You must not host, share or link to content that:

• belongs to another person and is shared without their consent, including private or sensitive information about them;
• is defamatory, obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, invasive of another’s privacy, or promotes hatred, discrimination or violence;
• is harmful to children;
• infringes a patent, trademark, copyright or other proprietary right;
• violates any law in force in India;
• deceives or misleads people about where it comes from, or knowingly shares false information, including phishing pages that imitate a brand or a login;
• impersonates another person or organisation;
• threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with other countries, or public order;
• contains software viruses, malware or code meant to damage or interrupt a computer or network;
• is manifestly false and untrue and written to harass, harm or mislead for gain.

You also must not use Namestead for spam, to attack other systems, to avoid our checks, or to send traffic through the proxy that is not your own site. We scan names for malware and phishing signals and we watch certificate logs for certificates we did not expect.

When we act

We may warn, park, suspend or remove a name, and limit or close an account, when we have reason to think these Terms or the law are being broken. Serious or repeated cases are handled faster. We act on a valid order of a court or a notice from the appropriate government authority within the time the law requires.

You can appeal a suspension by writing to the grievance contact on the Contact page. We acknowledge within 24 hours and aim to decide within 15 days. Reports of abuse are handled as described on the Abuse page.

Trust Points, tiers and badges

Trust Points, tiers, supporter badges and achievements are recognition inside Namestead. They have no cash value, cannot be bought or sold, and can change as the project changes. A higher tier gives more names and more modes and a heavier vote, nothing else. The top two tiers also need a person to approve you.

Points are lost for confirmed abuse, bad-faith reports and chargebacks. Inactivity never costs points.

Requests and votes

Any signed-in user can ask for a domain to be added and can vote once per domain. Votes are weighted by trust tier. We run automatic checks on each request and review them afterwards. A request is a suggestion: we decide what to buy, and we may decline a request that does not meet our domain acceptance policy.

Contributions

Anyone can contribute money to the project. A contribution is voluntary and is not the price of a name: names stay free. See the Support page for what contributions pay for, and the Refund and Cancellation page for the only cases in which money is returned.

A contribution gives no ownership, equity, voting right or control over Namestead, a domain or any name.

The service itself

We work hard to keep names online but we do not promise the service will always be available or error-free. It is provided as it is. Planned and unplanned downtime, DNS and certificate delays, and the actions of third parties we depend on (registrars, DNS and hosting providers, certificate authorities) can affect your names.

You keep all rights in your own content. You give us only the permission we need to route traffic to it and to show your name where you have asked for it to be shown.

Our responsibility

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profits or lost data arising from your use of a free service, or for what you or other users publish. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited under Indian law, such as liability for fraud or wilful wrongdoing.

Changes to these Terms

We will tell signed-in users about material changes by email or a notice in the dashboard before they apply, and in any case remind users of these Terms at least once a year. The date at the top of each policy page says when it last changed. If you keep using Namestead after a change takes effect, you accept it; if you do not, you can delete your account.

Law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of India. Courts in India that have jurisdiction can hear any dispute. Please write to us first (see the Contact page); most problems are solved that way.