We commented a bit on the site RateMyCop, which had recently come under fire from the Tempe, Arizona police department as being somewhat dangerous to the health and welfare of the police force. Our summary judgment was that we saw it "as a healthy example of governmental transparency, even though it is being done by way of citizen involvement, rather than through voluntary governmental action."
Very shortly after we reviewed it (a matter of hours, really), GoDaddy pulled the plug on the site:
GoDaddy apparently at first told him he'd been shut down over "suspicious activity," a story which quickly changed to "the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit." Sesto thinks this is asinine, citing statistics of only 80,000 page views yesterday, and 400,000 the day before.
This news brought all manner of GoDaddy negative stories out of the woodwork, and between the three posts covering the topic, we had a total of 45 comments, and most of them providing a negative rating of GoDaddy's hosting history, not to mention a poll which showed a fairly overwhelming minority of voters having some sort of negative GoDaddy impression from the recent bad PR.
Following the poll, news emerged that RateMyCop had found hosting with RackSpace to alleviate the problem with hosting at GoDaddy. Apparently, the folks at RackSpace don't read the news at all, because they pulled a big bait-and-switch on Sesto and RateMyCop that is even shadier than the move GoDaddy pulled. From Reason's account of the affair:
Last week, it all got weirder. Hosting service GoDaddy mysteriously terminated Sesto’s account, and pulled RateMyCop.com offline. GoDaddy has offered several explanations to Wired’s ThreatLevel blog, but thus far, none of them have made much sense. Sesto gave up on GoDaddy, and next tried to get the site hosted at RackSpace. They turned him down. After initial accepting his down payment for hosting services, a RackSpace lawyer sent a letter to Sesto stating that, “We believe that the website to be found at www.ratemycop.com as described to our sales representative could create a risk to the health and safety of law enforcement officers.”