We decided on things we didn''t want to allow within our network to help keep the network as clean as possible so our customer's experience is as pleasent as possible....We have many clients running extremely important misson critical applications and believe it or not many of them specifically look for hosts who prohibit things like IRC's on the network.
If YOUR Hello Kitty websites kept incurring DoS attacks, than your VPS would probably be suspended. I don't think KH would ban it entirely unless the situation got as bad and prevalent as IRC's.
Thanks for the honest answers anyway. My interpretation is the de-facto criteria for a banned service on Knownhost is any and all applications network admins have found to be more often associated with attacks from external parties. Applying that principle to my case, I presume I am not allowed to use my spare bandwidth to proxy Twitter for the Iranian people because Knownhost is afraid the Iran government would DoS attack the network.
It seems to me, hosting providers' mission to "keep the network clean" is great, but not when it misguidedly goes about accomplishing that by curtailing their own customers legitimate uses instead of curtailing the bad actors launching attacks. This "practical" approach effectively hands over the power to decide acceptable use to any malicious entity across the global Internet willing to employ electronic intimidation.
"Not getting involved" and just banning customers from running whole categories of applications (proxies) is indeed cheaper and easier for any hosting provider than tackling network defense challenges. But I find that a particularly troubling policy. Not only from an ethical perspective, but a business one as well.
For example, by this way of thinking, if a "Hello Doggy" competitor attacked my "Hello Kitty" website for business advantage, Knownhost would apparently not stand by me to fight the attack but instead force me to take down my website, regarding me as the party responsible for running an application that dirtied the network.
IMO, Knownhost could manage this situation in a far more responsible and customer supportive way. For example, networks running perceived "risky" services could be segregated from networks running "mission critical" services. More stringent network defenses could be deployed. Customers' freedoms to use purchased resources for any legal commercial or free-speech purpose they chose could be fully respected. That is the sort of network use approach that I feel compelled to support, even though this issue doesn't personally affect me at all. Over the past three years as a customer I've done nothing more controversial on my own VPS than infrequent shell programming.
Can anyone suggest a reliable hosting provider who operates more along the lines I'm suggesting?
