http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/godaddy-silence.html

This is again why I don't keep any domains at GoDaddy.

Luckily for him the domain itself wasn't hosted with them.. Seems to be at name.com..
Would be a bigger headache if it were.

Sure would be nice to know the actual reason why. But...oh well...at least Sesto's able to move it away without further incident.

Still, that site has the word risk written all over it, IMHO.

This isn't a registrar issue. It's a hosting issue. I can well see why GoDaddy might find the content on a website about rating cops against their ToS.

I can just imagine some corrupt cop getting a judge to issue an order to shut the site down.

Godaddy, the Rush Limbaugh of hosts.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Do a takedown, and get the news into wired.com.

In other words, the ratemycop site had a flood of people come in and the founder of the site did not want to pay more... somehow that is godaddy's fault.

Right. Got it.

I think there is a reason why companies have shared/virtual/dedicated servers.


"The site's operator has publicly disclosed the concerns were over bandwidth," spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll writes in an e-mail "More accurately, GoDaddy's concerns were about how the RateMyCop site was far exceeding the amount of server usage for which it had contracted."

I asked for clarification, and Driscoll agreed with Sesto that RateMyCop.com hadn't exceeded its monthly bandwidth allotment. But the spike in popularity that followed the police backlash resulted in far more simultaneous connections than GoDaddy can handle under the low-budget shared hosting plan Sesto signed up for.

There's no hard contractual limit on the number of connections a customer can receive at once, but Driscoll says GoDaddy pulled the plug under a broad provision of its terms-of-service that lets it "remove your website temporarily or permanently from its virtual dedicated servers if GoDaddy is the recipient of activities that threaten the stability of its network."

"Basically, he was paying for compact car, when he really needed a semi-truck," Driscoll writes. "The customer was not willing to work with our staff to resolve the issue."

That portion you quoted wasn't in the article that time Ross posted it here. It happened to update after with that development you subsequently mentioned.

Chances are, Go Daddy, eNom, etc. are prepared to lose potential customers because of things like this with their marketing strategies and customer support processes. They seem to be working for them so far or they wouldn't have lasted this long in this cutthroat business.