How does your hosting company handle report of an abuse?
Tags: Content Plagiarism, Hosting, Running a Hosting Business
Hosting companies usually receive complaints of abuse from time to time and take action on them based on the already defined set of processes and procedures. But are you a new hosting company and do not know how to handle such reports of abuse? Here’s some information that will help you deal with such complaints of abuse.
First, let’s look at the most common abuse complaints that most of the hosting companies receive on a day to day basis.
- Spam - Spam could be through email, website, links and many other ways. Such type of abuse are reported more often than anything else.
- Content Plagiarism - The second type of abuse on the list is content plagiarism where the offending website that’s hosted with you has stolen content from some other website and the issue is being reported for your action.
- Hosting illegal content - You will often come across complaints reporting hosting of illegal files such as pirated copies of full software, mp3 files, full movies etc.
Now that we know what the majority of abuse complaints are about, let’s look at how to handle them and avoid any kind of trouble for ourselves.
What should you do and should not when you receive abuse complaints.
- Do not reveal personal information of your clients to the requester or the person filing a complaint. Often the abuse complaint is bogus and filed only with the sole purpose of obtaining personal information.
- Do not take an action immediately without verifying the facts. Example - someone could file a content plagiarism complaint or DMCA with you but in reality the website could have nothing to do with it or may have offended unintentionally.
- Do refer to the terms and conditions of service before you take an action.
- Do consult your lawyer if you are in doubt.
- Do not reveal personal information to anyone other than law authorities who will always send you a court notice and legal documents to obtain such sensitive information about your clients.
- Do inform legal authorities such as police or other government agencies if you notice any kind of illegal activity happening on your servers. Don’t handle such issues by yourself. Involving law to handle such issues is a better way of handling it.
Please feel free to share your experience and thoughts through the comments section below.
[tags]Content Plagiarism, Hosting, Running a Hosting Business[/tags]
