Legal Threat for tracking Uptime

27 Mar
2007

We get all sorts of legal threats and what not.

The latest one (in a long line of bizarre ones) comes from ISPhost.org. Yet another web hosting company out there (with what has to be one of the ugliest designs out there) sent us a nice little letter threatening to sue us. It was boilerplate: We are from XX, how dare you track us and attack our servers, cease or we will sue.’

A few things that really bug me about this:

In many cases I think – “that’s nice, go ahead and send your C&D.” But in their case, we are actually providing them with (very targeted) traffic to their website. Removing them from the directory was elementary.
How do they know we aren’t a customer? As a customer, do I not have a right to know if my website is up? Are they hiding something?
The attack claim – we ping them once every 10 minutes (if they are down, we increase the speed at which we check). Assuming they have 0% downtime, in one day thats 6×24 = 144 checks a day. Are their servers so weak that they cannot sustain 144 ‘pageviews’ by a single user in an entire day?

Just another case of over-reaction (and I know full well both what DDOSes feel like and what running a server infrastructure entails).

In: Big Brother|I Don't Get it Department

8 Responses to Legal Threat for tracking Uptime

Can You Get Sued For Tracking Your Blog’s Uptime? at The Blog Herald

March 28th, 2007 at 4:22 am

[...] Legal Mar 28, 2007 at 3:21 am by J. Angelo Racoma – I would say the answer should be no. But some people think otherwise. Earlier this month, BlogFlux launched its uptime tracker, which was intended for bloggers to monitor their blog hosts’ uptime. Apparently, hosting company ISPHost.org felt that this was tantamount to an invasion of, or an attack on, their servers. They sent BlogFlux a cease and desist letter, as Ahmed cites at Tech Soapbox. The latest one (in a long line of bizarre ones) comes from ISPhost.org. Yet another web hosting company out there (with what has to be one of the ugliest designs out there) sent us a nice little letter threatening to sue us. It was boilerplate: We are from XX, how dare you track us and attack our servers, cease or we will sue.â€™ [...]

Anthony

March 30th, 2007 at 4:35 am

I ran a small web host for close to five years and never heard of a host not wanting their stats published unless they are less than flattering. Obviously this mob must have been nervous what it was going show the world about their uptime levels.

I saw an incident last weekend with one of Australia’s payment gateway providers being down all weekend and not knowing something was wrong because no one was in the office on Saturday or Sunday. Imagine just how many transactions got missed! Since then I’ve set up uptime monitoring for all my service providers not just my web host just in case.

Ahmed

March 30th, 2007 at 6:36 pm

Ugh – I hear you on that. We did web hosting for about three years (before ev1 and what not) and yep, I agree with you – if you can’t take those pings you shouldn’t be in this business.

James

May 7th, 2007 at 10:50 am

Ahmed nice comment since your the one who wrote the original post. This is your 4th article about this. There are thousands of website monitoring companies today and they cannot allow them all to ping all day at there leisure without permission. There are reliable uptime monitoring companies that can be trusted much more then Ahmed’s new website monitoring operation. Most hosts have dozens and dozens of servers and Ahmed pinging one of them all day long does not give any true representation of the hosts uptime. When Ahmed is asked to not ping he writes nasty articles about the people who do not want him pinging without permission. Nobody asked Ahmed to monitor anything. He just loads hundreds of hosts without permission and starts pinging them all day wasting bandwidth and causing concern.

Ahmed

May 7th, 2007 at 10:55 am

Four articles? I didnâ€™t know I wrote any other than this