Does Your Web Host Censor Your Blog?

November 10, 2006 by 4 Comments

Mine doesn’t. But apparently Dreamhost does – that’s the claim being made over at the Blog Herald. If it’s true, it’s quite scary, given how big they are. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more about this in the blogosphere today.

update: it appears I read the post incorrectly, and the accusations are that Dream host is censoring their own blog, not their customers.  Sorry for the confusion and incorrect information.

Filed Under: Blogging ·
  • visitor

    The article you’re linking to doesn’t even claim what your title says: it’s claiming censorship of comments on the company’s blog, at blog.dreamhost.com or dreamhoststatus.com – not on the private blogs of its customers. Whether or not that’s true is up in the air, but before we go “OMG the children!” let’s try to understand the substance of the matter.

  • http://www.dreamhost.com/ Jeff @ DreamHost

    Just a clarification – they are/were claiming that we censor _our_ own weblog comments, which as far as we can tell is not the case.

    We definitely don’t censor customer sites/weblogs, and the original poster of that weblog entry did not claim that was occurring.

    - Jeff C. @ DreamHost Web Hosting

  • http://www.dreamhost.com/ Jeff @ DreamHost

    Just an addendum – as there was another comment later on that quoted the original post, it looks like maybe it was removed. It’s still not clear if this was an intentional act by an employee or if someone was a bit overzealous in removing spam postings, but I wanted to make it clear that I am not calling the original weblogger a liar.

    The comment itself wasn’t all that bad, all things considered – we’ve heard much worse – so why someone here would intentionally remove it is beyond me. We have more important things to do than get rid of critical posts.

    - Jeff C. @ DreamHost Web Hosting

  • http://www.dreamhost.com/ Jeff @ DreamHost

    Another update. :)

    Turns out that Mr. Krug’s comments were eaten by a WordPress plug-in we use called SpamKarma – apparently it thought his comments were spam and retroactively removed them.

    No DreamHost employee was involved in selectively censoring his comments. It was an automated removal.

    I’ve posted a comment to this effect to his site, though it’s stuck in moderation until his approves it. We’ve explained the situation and have asked that if he has similar concerns in the future he contact us for an explanation before posting such accusations to his weblog.

    - Jeff C. @ DreamHost Web Hosting