War For Freedom-of-Speech Rages On

The war against freedom of speech rages on in the Internet with PRQ’s deviance to keep Wikileaks, a whistleblower resource site, up inspite of takedown notices from lawyers.

PRQ, reportedly operated by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracking site well known for being a frequent target of Hollywood movie studios and other intellectual property crusaders, is located in Sweden.

Gottfrid and Fredrik’s experience with The Pirate Bay has given PRQ’s operators a wealth of experience in dealing with hostile legal action from corporate interests.

PRQ provides bulletproof hosting, secure no questions asked services to a limited number of customers, maintaining almost no customer information and keeping few or no logs of their activity. Previously only well-known amongst spammers and gambling site operators, bulletproof hosting may in this instance be a vanguard in fighting for people’s rights to freedom of speech.

US District Judge Jeffrey White issued the order to pull down Wikileaks Friday, February 15, at the behest of Swiss bank Julius Baer, which accused the site of illegally hosting some documents that the poster alleges show the bank enabling activities like money laundering and tax evasion.

The all-points takedown notice has been criticized broadly as an offense against freedom of speech. The order has been largely ineffective in silencing the site, which is still available via its IP address and at its India- and Belgium-based domains.

A quick check to the belgium site reveals that Julius Baer had dropped its lawsuit against Wikileaks.

Web Host Afhosting Re-design Website and Upgrade Plans

Afhosting.com recently redesigned their website with a cleaner overall look. Additionally, they have also improved upon their hosting plans with multiple new features to better cater for their personal, professional and business customers.

Examples of the new features the company included in their new plans are the cPanel web hosting and the unlimited domain hosting.

Afhosting.com offers three plans all catering to different customer types. The Starter plan with 30GB storage and 100GB bandwidth capacity is geared towards the personal websites and only cost $5.99 a month. For less than double the price, you get to enjoy their professional plan; complete with twice the storage and bandwidth capacity. They even have the Business plan with its’ unlimited bandwidth for only $14.99/month.

Kenny O, ICT for Afhosting.com, stated, “With Online Site Builder, which is included free with all our web hosting plans, you can build an informative, attractive web presence that you can update and maintain in-house, without contracting outside developers.”

A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.

From the opening of a New York Times article, A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears, this paragraph initially conveys a message of fear and panic across the cyber-world. However, reading further into the article reveals yet another issue.

The story goes that Steve, a british national who lives in spain and operates a travel agency, had 80 of his websites disabled; just because the American government suspects him of promoting terrorist activities.

eNom took down his websites from their Domain Name Servers when they learned that they were on the US Treasury’s blacklist, without even notifying Steve of the incident.

For starters, this is absurb and a perfect example of the American government nosing into other people’s businesses. On top of that, it shows the incompetence of the American government in generalizing everything in site that has the slightest hint of threat to them.

How could that they blacklist all of Steve’s domains that has a term “Cuba” not also shut down the last remaining domain, www.cuba-guantanamo.com? It is just as if they are choosing the list from a dart board.

Is VEXXHOST Overselling with Its TeraByte Hosting?

VEXXHOST recently launched its “TeraByte Hosting” plan, offering customers 1TB of disk space, alongside 3TB of monthly data transfer. The new plan is priced at $5 per month and includes the ability to host 50 domain names, unlimited MYSQL, unlimited emails, a free domain name and no setup fee, when customers sign up for an annual contract.

Such overly generous offering has always been frown upon. Many in the web hosting community brand the practice as “overselling” - wherein a host portions out far more storage of bandwidth than it actually has - at best a marketing gimmick.

However, doing some research off Google, I found this positive thread review of VEXXHOST from Webhostingtalk. Not to sound too eager, but I am pretty convinced that this web host might have some flexing muscle after all. An excerpt from the thread as followed:

…So far no downtime, pretty fast load time. Now for [their] support I go through the contact form and I recieve assitance about 15-30 minutes later, which is pretty good but it might be faster if you go through the ticket system where you can choose if it is urgent or low priority. So far I am very happy with there service.

Providing a range of services, including shared hosting, reseller, virtual private servers and dedicated server plans, the company says it also offers Fantastico, a money back guarantee and discounts on the Web CEO SEO software.

The Threat if Google Enters the Web Hosting Business

Although Google hasn’t started any business in web hosting, I believe they’ll surely succeed and grow significantly when they do. By the time they decide to enter the competition, there could be a serious pendulum shift in their favour. Why?

For starters, web hosting is a promising industry with huge untapped market. So far, only a very small amount is hosted by large web hosts (4-5%) while others are gathered in small or middle hosts (more than 10,000 accounts). What Google has is tons and tons of money to start a web hosting business and expand it into a world class act. Before we know it, Google will be eating up our customers.

There are no major obstacles for Google to get into the business, really. In a web hosting business, as long as you have a web connection, you can easily resell hosting. And, Google have that and more…

Many will eagerly pay to get pay-per-click. Google can easily give up #1 spots on the search list to market a their Web hosting packages. Or simply create new marketing spot above the search results to accommodate it.

To build a great hosting company, you need the skilled staff to provide smooth traffic for the customers; block harmful viruses, worm, and hackers; and maintain the 100% uptime to avoid server downtime. Google has all of them.

A desirable e-mail extension is one of the perks from having your own domain name. Why can Google enter the business? Gmail of course! Although wasn’t flawless, at least Google has mail service. They already have huge amount of e-mail customers, meaning they’re familiar with e-mail management and can promote hosting service to uncountable customers.

Most will only do business with a brand they trust. And, Google *is* a household name.

To counter such an act will require tremendous amount of effort, not to mention, deep enough pockets to offset any marketing campaign made.