A friend of mine intends to start a Adult Hosting company.

How does a webhosting company check to see if the content is legal?

Appreciate your feedback

Hello,

Most web hosts don't check the legality of content on their servers. 2257 law exepmts them from liability for underage or inappropriate material, though I doubt that would fly is the web hoster was also the website's owner. Nearly all webhosts have liability disclaimers in their MSA. If it isn't clearly illegal (ten year olds or sex with animals) then you're generally ok. I personally like to check the site out for a few clicks to make sure nothing like that is going on and beyond that I rely in my liability disclaimers indicating that I am not responsibile and exert no control over their data but instead I just make sure their server is online. I suspect that's how it is nearly everywhere.

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

Meaning to say there is nothing much the webhost can do apart from checking out the website itself?

Isn't anyway to verify the legality of the content?

Meaning to say there is nothing much the webhost can do apart from checking out the website itself?

Not much really, if you end up hosting many hundreds of sites then you won't have the time to check them all.


Isn't anyway to verify the legality of the content?

Nope, also remember that what is illegal in your country may be legal in another.

The only time the webhost can know is when someone complaints?

As far as I understand, it's totally the responsibility of your clients.
You have to act immediately if you receive a complaint from anyone. Be it goverment, police, whoever.
The material on the server should always be legal in the country the server is hosted in. Whether or not the clients country allows such material isn't important.

You can check your clients but it's not really worth it. You can't police your clients 24/7/365 and I don't think it's expected. You could occasionally do spot-checks on the content or just check the index page of their sites if you want.
Some domains are obviously warez or CP so often you can tell just by looking at the domain names.

If you're not running your servers but another company is, it's always a good idea to confirm their policy on illegal sites. Most will terminate that single website (if they stumble across illegal content) but it's always a good idea to check in case they terminate your account too.

There is no way to monitor all of your sites, just be careful of who you host and verify all your orders and if you are hosting anything you shouldn't be don't worry someone will contact you one way or another :)

And don't irritate the government, especially the FBI. I remember reading an article in which one company kept putting them off on something similar that had to do with content and they (the FBI) seized all the company's servers.