Bulletproof hosting

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bulletproof hosting (sometimes known as 'bulk-friendly' hosting) is a service provided by domain hosts which allows their customer considerable leniency in the kinds of material they may upload. This leniency has been taken advantage of by spammers and providers of online gambling or pornography.

Many service providers have Terms Of Service that do not allow certain materials to be uploaded, or the service to be used in a particular way, and may suspend a hosting account, after a few complaints, to minimise the risk of their IP subnet being blocked by anti-spam filters using Internet Protocol (IP) based filtering. Additionally, some service providers may have ethical concerns that underpin their service terms and conditions.

Generally, a bulletproof host allows a content provider to bypass the laws regulating internet content and service in his country of operation as many of these 'bulletproof hosts' are based 'overseas' (relative to the geographical location of the content provider).