Your privacy shouldn’t be the price of visiting a website.
NameStand tries to collect only the information reasonably needed to operate this website, provide services, communicate with customers, maintain security, and conduct normal business.
We aren’t interested in building advertising profiles about visitors or following people around the Internet.
Website analytics
NameStand uses Fathom Analytics to understand basic website traffic.
We use analytics to answer practical questions such as which pages are being visited and whether people are finding the information they’re looking for.
Fathom is designed as a privacy-focused analytics service and does not use cookies or similar tracking technologies in its analytics script.
We chose it specifically because we want useful website statistics without turning visitors into advertising profiles.
We do not use analytics information to identify individual website visitors for advertising purposes.
Cookies
The public NameStand website does not intentionally use advertising or behavioral-tracking cookies.
Our public Hugo website is intentionally simple and largely static.
As additional NameStand services come online, particularly the customer portal, some functional cookies or similar browser storage may be necessary for things such as:
- Signing in
- Maintaining an authenticated session
- Security
- Shopping carts or ordering
- Customer preferences
- Other functions required to provide a requested service
If we need a cookie to make something you asked for work, that’s different from following you around the Internet to figure out which advertisement to show you next.
Information you choose to send us
If you contact NameStand, we will naturally receive the information you provide.
That may include things such as:
- Your name
- Your email address
- Your organization
- Your domain name
- Information about a website or service
- Technical details
- Support questions
- Sales or pre-sales questions
- Other information you include in the message
For technical support, email:
For sales and pre-sales questions, email:
Please don’t send passwords or other sensitive credentials through ordinary email.
If we need credentials or other sensitive information to perform work for you, we’ll arrange an appropriate way to handle them.
Customer information
When you become a NameStand customer, we need information to establish and maintain the business relationship and provide the services you’ve requested.
Depending on the services involved, that may include:
- Contact information
- Account information
- Billing information
- Service information
- Domain-registration information
- Technical configuration information
- Support requests and correspondence
- Records needed to provide and administer your services
We collect this information because providing hosting, email, domain, development, consulting, and related services requires us to know who the customer is and what services we’re supposed to provide.
We don’t collect customer information simply because it might become useful someday.
Billing and payment information
NameStand will use appropriate payment-processing and billing systems for customer transactions.
Those systems may need information required to process payments, maintain invoices, administer accounts, and satisfy financial or legal recordkeeping requirements.
As the NameStand customer and billing system is finalized, this policy will be updated to identify relevant providers and explain their role.
We don’t need or want unnecessary copies of sensitive payment information scattered through unrelated systems.
Domain-registration information
Domain registration has its own information requirements.
If NameStand registers or manages a domain for you, information required by the registrar, registry, or other organizations involved in domain administration may need to be collected and transmitted to those providers.
If your domain is registered somewhere else, you don’t need to transfer it to NameStand merely because you use another NameStand service.
Your domain is your domain.
Support records
Support requests may be retained so we have a useful record of:
- The problem reported
- Troubleshooting performed
- Configuration information
- Our responses
- Changes made
- The eventual resolution
This is one of the reasons we prefer written support through email and, eventually, the NameStand customer ticket system.
Keeping the history of a technical problem is considerably more useful than trying to reconstruct a telephone conversation from somebody’s memory three months later.
Server and security logs
Like other Internet services, NameStand systems may generate technical logs as part of normal operation, security, troubleshooting, abuse prevention, and system administration.
Those logs may contain technical information associated with requests or connections.
We use operational logs for operating and protecting systems, investigating problems, identifying abuse, troubleshooting, and other legitimate administrative purposes.
We don’t operate infrastructure logs as an advertising system.
Information sharing
NameStand does not sell customer information or website visitor information as a business model.
We may provide information to third parties when reasonably necessary to:
- Deliver a service you’ve requested
- Process a payment
- Register or administer a domain
- Provide infrastructure or other contracted services
- Investigate fraud, abuse, or security incidents
- Comply with applicable legal obligations
- Protect NameStand, our customers, or others where reasonably necessary
A hosting company cannot honestly claim that no third party will ever process customer information. Service providers, registrars, payment processors, infrastructure providers, and other companies may be necessary to deliver particular services.
Our preference is simple: share what is necessary for the service, not everything that happens to be available.
Third-party services
Some NameStand services depend on other providers.
Examples may include:
- Domain registrars and registries
- Payment processors
- Hosting infrastructure
- Email infrastructure
- Fathom Analytics
- The NameStand customer-management and billing platform
Those providers have their own privacy and data-handling practices.
As the NameStand service platform develops, we’ll update this policy when identifying a provider is useful to understanding how customer information is handled.
External links
NameStand pages may occasionally link to websites operated by other organizations.
Once you follow an external link, that organization’s website and privacy practices are outside NameStand’s control.
A link is not permission for another site to behave itself, unfortunately.
Data retention
We don’t intend to keep personal information merely for the pleasure of possessing it.
How long information must be retained depends on why it exists.
Some information may need to remain while an account or service is active. Some records may need to be retained for billing, accounting, security, dispute resolution, legal, or other legitimate business purposes.
Other information may be deleted when it is no longer reasonably needed.
As our production customer systems and retention practices are finalized, this section can become more specific.
Security
NameStand takes reasonable technical and administrative measures intended to protect the systems and information under our control.
That is not the same thing as claiming that any system is impossible to compromise.
No responsible provider should make that promise.
Security involves identifying risk, limiting unnecessary exposure, maintaining systems, monitoring for problems, responding appropriately when something happens, and continually making reasonable decisions about what needs to be protected.
The technical experience behind NameStand includes decades of work in computing, networking, systems administration, hosting, and information security.
We take the responsibility seriously without pretending security can be reduced to a badge on a website.
Children
NameStand’s services are not specifically designed or marketed for children.
If information involving a minor becomes relevant to a particular service or account, it will be handled according to the circumstances and applicable requirements.
Your choices
One of the easiest ways to protect information is not to provide unnecessary information in the first place.
If something isn’t needed to provide a service, we’d generally prefer not to collect it.
You also have choices about which NameStand services you use.
Hosting with NameStand doesn’t require moving your domain registration.
Using NameStand email doesn’t require moving your website.
Hiring NameStand for development or consulting doesn’t require transferring every other service you use.
Use what you need. Keep what already works.
Questions about privacy
If you have questions about this privacy policy or how NameStand handles information, contact us.
For general or business questions:
For technical or account-related support:
Policy changes
This policy will change as NameStand services develop.
In particular, the introduction of the customer portal, billing systems, domain services, payment processing, and other production services may require additional details.
When the way we handle information materially changes, the privacy policy should change with it.
The objective is straightforward:
Collect what we need, protect what we have, and don’t turn customer data into another product.