*is nervous*

[paraka]

Hey Flist,
I know I've been ignoring you of late, and I'm sorry, but I've got a question, and I hope you guys can help me.

So, my webpage is hosted on Dreamhost. So far I've loved it to pieces, and haven't had any problems. I not only host my webpage, I also host carr0ts1979, snarry.net, another fic page, some other peoples vids, and some questionable videos.

I've heard some rumours lately that there has been a crack down on dreamhost pages that house such questionable videos as my own does, and I'm getting nervous. Has anyone heard any specifics? What happened to the people that it happened to. Did they have any warning? Did they lose everything, including their money? I don't want to get into a panic and rip everything down. But if it comes down to possibly losing everything, or playing it safe, well I have too much other stuff on my server to risk it....

Comments

[paraka]

Yeah, I finally went and asked one of the girls who'd had her account taken away. She had no warning, and now she's fighting to get her stuff back. She had databases, and archives, and she hosted a ton of people's webpages, and so far everything's been lost. She also sent me to a community where there are a lot of Dreamhost, users who share material in various forms. It's really scary. Like 10-15 people there lost their accounts. And they were really hiding what they had uploaded. Not like me, I just have the plain .avi's up with thier real name, on a subdomain with the TV shows name. They had them rar'ed and password protected with unrecognizable names and fake extensions. They'd upload various fake files of different sizes to hide the eps, and they had it over various domains and users.

And another scary thing, is that a bunch of them e-mailed back asking why it had been taken down, (since they had been hiding it so well) and the reply had specific names of TV shows they had up, even after all that protection. One person had a movie cited as the reason, and they had taken the movie down *months ago* so now I'm afraid that even taking everything down isn't going to save me :S

People have various hypothesis' about why certain sites were taken down, and others not, 2 of which are:
a) A lot of the people who had their sites taken down didn't actually pay for them, they had enough referrals that their space was paid for in full. Which totally doesn't apply to me, since I've never given a referral before.
b) They tracked them through to LJ download communities where they posted links to their content. This totally does apply to me, since I ad been using the same places as them. :S

I'm thinking of getting a Netfirms account just in case. Someone showed me a promotion they have going on for $10. You get everything for a year. Not quite as much as Dreamhost, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper, and so far, others have had copyrighted materials up with no problem.

Thanks for responding. I spent last night in a *total* panic. I mean, I felt like I was going to throw up :S:S:S:S I'm feeling better this morning now that I have a plan. Gah, Dreamhost has now gone from "The most awesome webhoster evah!" to "OMG you gave me an ulcer!"