This Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) supplements the Terms of Use and specifies which use of the service is permitted or prohibited. Violations may lead to immediate blocking of individual IP addresses or network ranges.
1. Permitted use
The service may be used free of charge by private individuals, families, schools, associations and smaller organisations – for recursive DNS name resolution, for authoritative hosting of their own domains and for dynamic DNS updating (DynDNS) – as long as this happens within a customary, non-abusive scope.
2. Prohibited uses
The following is in particular prohibited:
- using the service for unlawful purposes or for the commission, preparation or concealment of criminal offences;
- DNS amplification or reflection attacks and other measures aimed at overloading or impairing third parties or the service itself;
- DNS spoofing, cache poisoning or other attacks on the integrity of the DNS infrastructure;
- resolving domains used for the operation of botnets, command-and-control infrastructure, phishing, malware or scam campaigns, to an extent or for a purpose that abuses the service;
- circumventing rate limits, blocks or other protective measures;
- automated mass queries without an apparent legitimate purpose (e.g. scraping, systematic probing of entire namespaces);
- reusing the service as an upstream resolver for own public services or commercial offerings without express consent;
- any use that is suitable for endangering the reputation, availability or legal position of the operator.
3. Special rules for DNS hosting
The following applies additionally to the authoritative hosting of your own zones:
- only domains over which you are authorised to dispose may be hosted; hosting third-party or uncontrolled domains is prohibited;
- DNS records may not be created for phishing, the distribution of malware, command-and-control infrastructure, sending spam, fraud or other unlawful purposes;
- deliberately creating false or misleading records to deceive third parties is prohibited;
- organisations and member permissions may not be used to circumvent the above rules;
- the operator may block or delete affected zones, records, accounts or organisations at any time in case of violations.
4. Choice of hostnames and suffixes (DynDNS)
When creating freely chosen subdomains – that is, addresses and personal suffixes – under the system domains provided by the operator, the following applies additionally:
- names must not contain offensive, discriminatory, hateful, violence-glorifying, sexually offensive, extremist or otherwise objectionable terms;
- names must not give the impression of being connected with or authorised by the operator, a public authority, a brand or a third party (impersonation);
- names must not be chosen in a misleading way to deceive about the origin of a service or to abuse third parties for phishing- or fraud-like purposes;
- names must not infringe the rights of third parties, in particular trademark, name or personality rights;
- the operator may rename, block or delete offensive, misleading or infringing names at any time without prior notice.
5. Special rules for monitoring
The following applies additionally to the active availability monitoring of your own hosts and services:
- only hosts and services over which you are authorised to dispose or for which you have explicit permission may be monitored; ownership must be proven via a DNS TXT record before the checks are activated;
- the check function may not be abused for attacks, port or vulnerability scanning, overloading (DoS), amplification or systematically probing third-party systems;
- the minimum intervals specified by the operator must be observed; circumventing interval, target or check limits is prohibited;
- notification channels (email, webhook, Slack, Discord, Telegram) may not be used to send unsolicited messages (spam) or to burden third parties;
- the operator may throttle, suspend or delete targets, checks, channels or accounts at any time in case of violations.
6. Rate limits
To ensure operation, technical limits are applied per source IP. These limits may be adjusted at any time without notice. Queries exceeding the limits may be discarded, throttled or lead to a block.
7. Response to abuse
In case of suspected abuse, the operator reserves the right to:
- block individual IP addresses or network ranges temporarily or permanently;
- block or delete individual zones, accounts or organisations;
- block or throttle certain query types or domains;
- send complaints to the responsible network or abuse contacts;
- in case of criminally relevant behaviour, file a criminal complaint and cooperate with authorities within the legally provided framework.
8. Reporting abuse
Reports of abuse of the service can be sent by e-mail to abuse@dremaxx.de. Processing takes place within the scope of available time and without entitlement to a response within a specific period.