I am probably not the first person to have this idea, but it seems like day after day you hear about these terrorist web sites that are spreading propaganda and talking about nefarious things. Anything on the Web is hosted somewhere right? So why not talk with the web hosts who hosts the material about brining it down.

According to a report from theWHIR.com this might be starting to happen. As the story goes, a local Tampa, Florida reporter told local web host Noc4Hosts about an al-Qaida related site they were hosting. This is not the only case of this happening though.

Over in Arizona, CrystalTech Web Hosting also took down an al-Qaida related site after being tipped off by the Arizona Republic newspaper. This site in question was sharing information about how to recruit car bombers, promote war on the West and provide a forum for Islamic militants.

So as you can see, US based web hosts are not except from being used for these low down and dirty reasons. No mater which political side of the fence you are on I think any web host out there that finds content like this one their servers should shut it down as soon as they can.

Why is it Happening and How Do We Stop It?

Now why are web hosts of any location such a good place to target? Well many web hosts out there host so many web sites it is hard to keep track of every single domain. You could check them out on sign up – but if you are signing up a new hosting plan and new domain name there is no way to check out the history of the person.

So should web hosts keep relying on customer complaints and reporters tipping them off to such sites or could web hosts start creating a “watch list” of their own for suspicious new signups and transfered domains? There are a lot of “maybe” and “could be” answers but what we need to do in a whole is bring the topic into the public web hosting discussion.