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).