Last weekend under the auspices of “Operation Protect Our Children” the Feds pulled the plug on 10 domains, claiming child pornography issues with the sites.
The plug pulling went quantum when one of the domains was found to host over 84,000 websites; an assortment of innocent small businesses and individuals, having nothing to do with the accusations.
For 6 days, the URLs for all these sites pointed to a page saying the domain has been seized and implying that the website you were trying to reach is run by people that have done something very wrong.
Mooo.com, the domain in questions, is owned by the administrator of Afraid.org and offer a FreeDNS service. This is similar to the kind of services offered by places such as WordPress.org and Blogger.com. You can host your site by creating it on a subdomain of mooo.com.
People tend to use these services because they are free and easy to set up – you don’t have to buy your own domain and have the technical hassle and recurring charges.
The downside to these services is that when something happens at the domain level, as in this incident, all the subdomains can be affected. IMHO, this kind of service is not a good idea for anyone who is serious about their online communications.
This is a case in point. All the businesses and individuals represented by these 84000+ domains had their entire website redirected to a this page.
What happens is that the feds redirect the domain name to their page. It’s not a hard thing to get around, but you need a bit of technical savvy, or instructions. (If you are the paranoid type, you might want to save those instructions in case the next time you visit the page, you get the image to the right 
)
I do have to agree that the government is out of bounds here, and the mistake of redirecting the mooo.com domain simply elevates the issue to the height it deserves. The conspiracy theorists, however, are having a “hay day” with more than enough to talk about:
But let’s rewind the history channel for a moment, and take a look at the reasoning presented that got this bill passed in the first place. Here’s a CNN video before the bill was passed, talking about how it supposedly was “going to be used” – great contrast:
The moral to the story is that you should be careful who you host with and be careful who you use for a DNS service. This can significantly reduce your exposure to issues that negatively impact your bottom line.
At the very least, run your sites on your own domain. Purchase the domain yourself and be the main point of contact with the registrar and the one responsible for renewing the purchase of the domain.
Next important step is to run your site on a dedicated server. This will help you in many ways with your natural search rankings as well. You can host all of your own websites on a single server (assuming you don’t get so much traffic the server has issues ). Your hosting company can help you get set up so each website has it’s own IP address. Sometimes there is a nominal charge for this service. If you are going to host more than a couple of websites on your server, make sure your hosting company can accommodate your IP address needs, otherwise look for a better hosting company.
Personally I host my own websites and run my DNS through a highly trusted source, though it’s not a big deal to host your own DNS either.
About Sue Bell
Sue Bell is the CEO of Theme Zoom LLC, co-inventor and mastermind behind Theme Zoom's 'Krakken' Online Marketing Tool and Domain Web Studio. Her experience with web design and expertise with systems design facilitated the creation of a tool that makes the life of an online marketer easier by automating both the difficult and mundane aspects of Market Research, Keyword Research, Website Site Structural Design, Implementation and Ranking.
