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March 17, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Domain registrar and hosting provider Go Daddy (godaddy.com) responded Monday to allegations that the company shut down a police watchdog site last week for reasons of "suspicious activity."
Up until last Tuesday, Go Daddy was hosting RateMyCop (ratemycop.com), a website that enables visitors to rate and comment on their community's police officers. Go Daddy shut down the site last Tuesday and redirected the domain to a Go Daddy page with the message, "Oops!!!"
The takedown sparked questions of censorship from around the Internet, as many speculated that Go Daddy had taken the site down in protest of its content. Go Daddy said otherwise.
Website founder, Gino Sesto, said Go Daddy's customer support told him that the site had been disabled under grounds of "suspicious activity." He says the company soon changed its story and said the site was taken down because it had exceeded bandwidth limitations.
On Monday, Go Daddy general counsel Christine Jones responded to an email request for comment by reiterating that the site was exceeding bandwidth limitations, and claiming that Sesto seemed unwilling to resolve the dispute.
"The situation was absolutely NOT about censorship in ANY way," wrote Jones. "The site's operator has publicly disclosed the concerns were over bandwidth. More accurately, Go Daddy's concerns were about how the RateMyCop site was far exceeding the amount of server usage for which it had contracted.
"This customer paid for a shared server plan. The connections to his site were six times more than an entire 'shared server' accommodates. While he was paying for a service that cost $14.99 a month, his site actually required a much more extensive set-up.
"Basically, he was paying for compact car, when he really needed a semi-truck. The customer was not willing to work with our staff to resolve the issue. It is important that the website administrators select a hosting plan appropriate for their needs and be willing to communicate with us if those needs require modification."
Last week, Sesto reportedly turned to RackSpace (rackspace.com) in hopes of finding a new Web host, but he says the company declined to host his site.
After first accepting his down payment for the services, Sesto says a RackSpace lawyer sent him a letter saying, "We believe that the website to be found at www.ratemycop.com as described to our sales representative could create a risk to the health and safety of law enforcement officers."
Reached for a statement, Rackspace said it was unable to comment on the RateMyCop story "due to its customer confidentiality policy."
As of Monday afternoon, RateMyCop.com was online. A DNS lookup appears to identify My cPanel Host (mycpanelhost.com) as the site's new home.
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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Comment by Anonymous on Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Peel the onion back two layers and I have to ask myself:
If my hosting company "disappeared" or "made me disappear"-
Have I already selected my next hosting company?
Opened a small account?
Uploaded a trial backup to make sure it works, so that all I have to do is change the DNS name servers???
That's my project for the week!!!
Now lets flip the coin and notice how difficult it is to quash a hate, phishing or other objectionable site. That is not the task of the hosting company but rather the domain registries who need to get their heads out of the sand, come up with some consistent rules and policies and create a fast track system for dealing with "illegal" sites.
Why doesn't someone, maybe Bob Parsons, give this guy a $100 so he can blow away GoDaddy's smokescreen?