Thoughts from ISPCON - Hotshots in Hosting
An important legal issue came to my mind in this ISPCON seminar. All of the participants mentioned the marketing utility of user forums. So, what legal liability do you have for your user forums? This is a very complex legal question. Courts tend to analyze this issue based on how much control you exercise over the forums. So, if you're responding to posts, giving advice, and moving, or removing, off topic posts, you are going to have some liability as a "publisher" of information. If you exercise no editorial control, your legal liability is likely to be lower. However, you are never going to have zero legal liability for user forums - or any forum for that matter. Key issues in minimizing liability are your terms of service and use, how you react to posts, and what your customers use your forums for.
David Snead is a lawyer whose practice is focused on internet infrastructure providers. In his eleven years in this practice, he has represented clients including multinationals, middle tier hosting companies, and two guys, a server, a T-1 and a huge MasterCard balance.
A long-time WHIR contribut... (Read full bio)
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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