Web site hosted with GoDaddy taken offline, details not clear.
According to Wired, GoDaddy took controversial site RateMyCop.com offline yesterday.
The domain RateMyCop.com is registered with Name.com, LLC, but was hosted at GoDaddy.
According to Wired’s article, visitors to RateMyCop.com on Tuesday were redirected to a GoDaddy page reading, “Oops!!!”, which urged the site owner to contact GoDaddy to find out why the company pulled the plug.
RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto told Wired he was given no notice of the suspension.
When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he’d been shut down for “suspicious activity.”
When Sesto got a supervisor on the phone, the company changed its story and claimed the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, a claim that Sesto says is nonsense. “How can it be overloaded when it only had 80,00 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?”
I tried to contact Sesto, but his site has private whois information. I also tried navigating the web site in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and could get the links to “contact” or “about” to work. As for GoDaddy, a spokeswoman told Wired it couldn’t comment because of its privacy policy. This sounds strange, as GoDaddy has commented on previous situations like this.
It’s important to note that this is not a domain name issue — this was a web hosting decision. However, it’s one more black mark on GoDaddy. The Wired article has dozens of comments already, many blasting GoDaddy for “doing this again”.
jack says
These kind of antics and censorship by Godaddy will be what leads to their downfall.
They are developing a reputation for censorship.
As is the case with many loud mouths like Parsons, they think it is only their opinion that is should be protected by the First Amendment.
KenL214 says
GoDaddy shouldn’t be in te business of community censorship… everybody is going to object to something, if ‘suspicious’ activity was alledged they have an obligation to investigate but was the questionable content immoral, corrupt, illicit, illegal, or prohibited speech? or just objectionable to a certin element?
Maybe these bloggers are reporting immoral, corrupt, illicit, illegal, prohibited and objectionable activities.
GoDaddy has an obligation to make a clear determination before they slam the door on the website… Which criminals need to be shut down????