Web Host Liability

Liability - one of those annoying words to which you have to pay proper attention or risk legal problems. A liability is, essentially, anything that puts you at risk or makes you susceptible to criticism, attack or successful legal action. Why does host liability matter to you? Well, obviously, you want to reduce your liability in general, but what it means in terms of web hosting services is that it’s one of the primary reasons you will be discouraged from certain practices or hosts might decline your business.

People, generally, are willing to take your money and the same goes for web hosts. If you want to run a website, they’ll usually let you. There is a slight catch, though. If you want to venture into anything that involves publishing racy content it might be harder to keep your website online. Hosts will typically hold their clients to an agreement that clearly defines acceptable terms of use, protecting them from civil actions or prosecution if you, using their services, engage in any illicit online activity.

The logic of host liability with Internet businesses is essentially analogous to the liability of someone hosting a party. If you have a wild party in your apartment and some frat boys get invited, show up, get sloppy drunk and start trashing things, you might owe your landlord some money for repairing, say, a hole in your wall. If your guests spill out into the halls of the building and harass your neighbors or do other damage to the building you’re also responsible along with the frat boys.

Frat boys aren’t usually a direct threat to a website or host, as they’re typically too busy attending keggers to learn how to hack a server, but hosts will still want to make sure the people to whom they sell their services are reliable. If you run a website doing something shifty then you’ll bear the primary responsibility, but there is such a thing as contributory liability. The idea is, essentially, that providing the service that enables someone to commit an infraction is also doing something wrong.

Usually, host liability only arises when it can be demonstrated that the host knew their users were doing something wrong, but that means they’ll try to avoid suspect behavior if at all possible so they can prove due diligence. It can, for example, be hard to find a host that will let you publish adult content because the adult entertainment industry is notorious for dubious business practices. If you’re engaging is any such business, you’ll have to keep your nose very clean to avoid problems with your hosts and, to guarantee there is no downtime caused by unreasonable suspicions, you may want to consider running your own servers.

Aside from legal issues, hosts have to be concerned with the respectability of the organizations whose websites they maintain. If, say, a host has many customers who commit infractions that can be traced back to an IP address maintained by a host, people will start limiting access to those addresses, which will have a long-term impact on the quality of service they can provide. For example, a blog hosting company or a company that typically runs shared servers can end up losing business because the IP address is linked to a whole range of the clients who will all be made suspect in the eyes of other ISPs and users.

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