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Having been in that business: Web hosting companies receive a TON of abuse. Some of them specialize in dealing with large DDoS attacks, unpopular/illegal/shady

by lima 7y ago

Having been in that business: Web hosting companies receive a TON of abuse. Some of them specialize in dealing with large DDoS attacks, unpopular/illegal/shady content, but most don't and want to spend their time on their product instead. Scammers typically open tons of similar accounts, register expensive phishing domains and host phishing pages on your network, and guilt-by-association is how you clean it up. Most of the things in their ToS are very common with any professional hosting company who is fed up with scammers, they just don't tell you about it like that. Their ToS, while I would never use them for my own company, made me laugh because I felt the pain.

ryanlol 7y ago
>Most of the things in their ToS are very common with any professional hosting company who is fed up with scammers, they just don't tell you about it like that. Yeah, maybe if you primarily deal with lowendtalk hosts operated by 12yo kids. Actual professional hosting companies would never even consider this stuff.
- lima 7y ago
  Screening domain registrations for abuse, removing sybil accounts (i.e. "guilt by association), cooperating with authorities, terminating the contract for DDoS attacks they can't handle and shutting down Nazi pages is something the vast majority of professional hosting companies will do. Of course, if it's a purely B2B hosting company of the "Talk to our sales department and sign a contract" variety, it's less of issue, but even they have to deal with spammers and fake company registrations who really want those clean IP blocks and will have clauses in their ToS that allows them to terminate the contract immediately. In fact, the only providers who do not do this are the cheap low-end hosts who don't care about their IP and ASN reputation.
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    >we may also wildcard your DNS to localhost and set the TTL on your zone out to a year. You’ve been warned Go ahead, name some "professional" hosting companies with similar practices.
    - lima 7y ago
      With how tongue-in-cheek the whole document is, this is clearly a joke to emphasize their point (which, I agree, has no place in a legal document, no matter how plain). My point is that everything else in the document is pretty much industry standard, except that others are less...direct about it. https://easydns.com/terms-of-service https://easydns.com/terms-of-service
      - ryanlol 7y ago
        >My point is that everything else in the document is pretty much industry standard Is it really surprising that a hosting industry company is similar to the other companies doing exactly the same thing? I feel like this is always going to be the case. It's specifically the weird stuff in this document that makes them stand out from the crowd.

by lima 7y ago

ryanlol 7y ago

>Most of the things in their ToS are very common with any professional hosting company who is fed up with scammers, they just don't tell you about it like that. Yeah, maybe if you primarily deal with lowendtalk hosts operated by 12yo kids. Actual professional hosting companies would never even consider this stuff.

lima 7y ago
Screening domain registrations for abuse, removing sybil accounts (i.e. "guilt by association), cooperating with authorities, terminating the contract for DDoS attacks they can't handle and shutting down Nazi pages is something the vast majority of professional hosting companies will do. Of course, if it's a purely B2B hosting company of the "Talk to our sales department and sign a contract" variety, it's less of issue, but even they have to deal with spammers and fake company registrations who really want those clean IP blocks and will have clauses in their ToS that allows them to terminate the contract immediately. In fact, the only providers who do not do this are the cheap low-end hosts who don't care about their IP and ASN reputation.
- ryanlol 7y ago
  >we may also wildcard your DNS to localhost and set the TTL on your zone out to a year. You’ve been warned Go ahead, name some "professional" hosting companies with similar practices.
  - lima 7y ago
    With how tongue-in-cheek the whole document is, this is clearly a joke to emphasize their point (which, I agree, has no place in a legal document, no matter how plain). My point is that everything else in the document is pretty much industry standard, except that others are less...direct about it. https://easydns.com/terms-of-service https://easydns.com/terms-of-service
    - ryanlol 7y ago
      >My point is that everything else in the document is pretty much industry standard Is it really surprising that a hosting industry company is similar to the other companies doing exactly the same thing? I feel like this is always going to be the case. It's specifically the weird stuff in this document that makes them stand out from the crowd.