This page describes our experiences with and opinions of
Ctyme Web Hosting
Marc Perkel

Ctyme Sucks

Looking for a web hosting solution for your strong opinions?
Maybe Computer Tyme Web Hosting by Marc Perkel is for you!
(Or then again, maybe not).

Marc Perkel's advertisement (below) for Ctyme Web Hosting

Here's what Ctyme says:

Free Speech Web Hosting - Do you have a controversial site? Are you trying to expose wrongdoing and have been driven off other hosts because the lawyers of scammers intimidated other hosts by threatening lawsuits? We don't scare easilly(sic) here. We are familiar with copyright and trademark law and not afraid to stand up to lawyers trying to block legal content. Our slogan this year is - No anti-bush site left behind.

 

Perkel continues:

Free Speech Hosting

We are very strong supporters of free speech and free expression and resist any attempts of governments to impose limits on what can be said on the web. Therefore, we allow content that many of the larger hosting companies might not. This is not to say that we allow anything and everything. But we believe strongly that the web belongs to the people of the world, and that it transcends governmental control. What makes Computer Tyme Hosting different than most other companies when it comes to free speech and privacy is that when other companies are threated by lawyers - they don't have the expertise or want to deal with the issues of determining if the lawyers who is making the threat has any legal basis to do so. We are not so timid around lawyers and we are familiar with legal issues surrounding fair use, trademark, copyright and slander. So if a lawyer calls us demanding that something be taken down - or that I turn over information about customers - they better have a legitimate court order in hand to do so - or we just tell them to get f**ked! And - there are quite a few lawyers out there that I've said that to. So if you are exposing corporate and government corruption - or just want to build a sucks site - you have a home with Computer Tyme Hosting. For example, France prohibits allowing it's citizens to view web sites with Nazi related materials, or trade merchandise from World War II. As a result, sites like Yahoo/Geocities scan their web pages and take down pages that say the word "Hitler" in them anywhere. Thus this page itself would be banned from Geocities. Our position is that France doesn't have the right to censor the web and French citizens are welcome to read whatever they want here and the Government of France can go fuck themselves. I'm legal savvy and France doesn't scare me. Neither does the United States. So we permit content that governments find offensive. Other examples include exposing online scams. Lawyers call me threatening everything in the world and I just tell them to go win a lawsuit and bring me an order with a judges signature on it - or don't bother wasting my time. If the lawyer makes a false representation - I file a bar complaint in the jurisdiction where they are licensed. What is not permitted is child pornography, extreme hate speech, and ripping off intellectual property. We do not police the content of your site. But if we are notified that you are posting copyrighted material, or material ripped off from other web sites without the author's permission, we will take the material down. This also including pirated software and pirated music files. We permit sexually oriented material as long as you are willing to pay for the data transfer costs. We reserve the right to require a deposit in advance for high data transfer sites.

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Sounds good, eh?

As the Internet increasingly becomes the domain of homogenized corporations, more and more web users are looking for a company to post their editorials, their opinions, their life's work, which will defend their Constitutional right to free and protected speech under the First Amendment. Some web hosts actually believe in the concept of the First Amendment. But some hosts, a growing number, simply see it as a bandwagon upon which to jump, and thereby attract a few more customers in a ludicrously competetive market -- no matter that they've never even heard of that thing called Free Speech and haven't a bloody clue what it's all about.

A couple of years ago we signed up with Marc Perkel, of Ctyme web hosting, because we had some controversial data we wanted to post. All of our content was meticulously cleared by our dedicated First Amendment attorney. Perkel was made aware of this. We asked Perkel if he would ever cave to absurd threats from attorneys whose clients simply didn't like our content. Perkel replied, in writing, that he would not. Nothing, he said, short of a court order would entice him to remove our content from his server.

We took him at his word and signed up.

Was Perkel's word worth the digital paper it was written on?

No.

In fact, Perkel didn't even wait to cave to an attorney's empty threat, he caved to a woman who simply didn't like what was written about her.

Let's take a look at this in detail:

Marc Perkel hosted our content for several years. In the beginning he hosted it for free. Sometime during the first year he decided to charge $100/year. That was fine with us, so we paid him. Numerous times over the next year Perkel emailed us to ask if we had paid, because his records were so screwed up that he simply didn't know one way or the other. Each time we'd send him a copy of the receipt. A few months later he'd email to ask again if we'd paid, and we'd repeat the process. This should have been a clue....but we ignored it. The reliability of Perkel's server was about like any other host you'll get for $100/year: Poor. There were outages of a day at a time. One outage in particular left us believing he had simply gone out of business because all of his hosted sites went down, and stayed down, and all emails to him went unanswered. We gave up and started moving our domains to another server. A couple of days later Perkel popped up as if nothing had happened and assured everyone that all was well. We decided to stay with Perkel. In the third year Perkel upped the price to $150/year. We paid it.

In 2007 we endured a pair of absolutely absurd interactions with two outrageous customers, both within the same week. When both of these customers pushed the problem to such an extent that we were compelled to file criminal complaints against them, we made the decision to outsource our customer service from that point forward. In order to illustrate to our good customers why we had done this, we posted an editorial about our experiences with bad and/or rude customers at this link. True to form, these two broads tried to get this content removed from public view. To that end one of them filed an AUP complaint with Rackspace. Unfortunately, the content was not hosted on Rackspace, so that went badly for them -- and for Rackspace, which made a fool of itself before even checking to see if the content was on their server. These two women then teamed up and figured out that the content was actually hosted on Marc Perkel's Ctyme server, and they complained to him about an AUP violation. Of course the content was as legal and protected as it gets. It wasn't even beginning to approach any limit of First Amendment protection, let alone push any limit. It was squarely within the domain of protected speech. --Not even a gray area. Perkel, advertising himself as a First Amendment advocate, should have known this. Instead, it turned out that Perkel seemed to know absolutely nothing about protected speech, and he didn't seem to be capable of doing 10 minutes worth of research to educate himself. Perkel asked us to actually go in and alter public documents so that the addresses of these two women were no longer posted. To his credit, Perkel did agree to stand behind the documents themselves, he just wanted the public documents to be altered so as to remove their addresses. We had already voluntarily removed their phone numbers from the public documents, but Perkel wanted their addresses removed as well. Of course the posting of their addresses was absolutely protected -- the courts have held that such editorials may not include social security numbers. Their addresses are publicly available from dozens of sources, online and off. But this didn't bother Perkel -- he wanted their addresses removed. This amazed us. Obviously, this guy was no more of a proponent of Constitutionally protected speech than Hillary Clinton. Perkel had caved without even checking to see what was allowable and defensible. His services as a "First Amendment Host" were actually worse than worthless, they were a liability.

Perkel emailed to say he would defend the web pages but said he had already removed the addresses in question. Curiously, he had not done this -- only claimed he had. It seems it was getting about time to bill us again so perkel started warming up for that. We sent Perkel the following email in reply:

We are stunned beyond comprehension. If this is going to stand you won’t NEED to include us in your accounting system. We are going to post copies of her complaints about us to public agencies, which include in THEM her address. If you’re going to strike that as well tell us right now. There’s another issue here too – we have included her address in our police complaint, which was also posted. Are you telling us you have gone into our account and ALTERED a copy of a police complaint? We’re stunned even by the mere suggestion that the police complaint or the DOJ complaint should be stripped of her address. In the case of the DOJ complaint, it’s a public document and SHE SUPPLIED HER OWN ADDRESS ON IT!!!! That you would even suggest this has scared us badly. We’re now talking to other hosts.

Perkel replied as follows:

I didn't read it all. If you have a police complaint that she filed that's a public record then no problem. Anyhow, both of them have made complaints to my ISP and they are inquiring what is going on. So I generally don't do anything but look to see if there's anything illegal. Generally if it's not copyrighted music or child porn I don't get involved.

But we were still nervous. We need to deal with professionals, people who are educated and stable and solid and have at least some training or education in First Amendment law. You can't hang out a shingle stating that you'll specifically host controversial issues without knowing at least SOMETHING about the legalities of what you're doing. We immediately began moving our sites to another host that had been screened thoroughly, and we also set the domains up on several other servers with failsafe dns entries so that if we ever encountered another Perkel we wouldn't have to worry about the loss of our content.

We replied to Perkel as follows:

Yes, these women are working together. Two peas in a pod. Yes, Poland filed a complaint with the California Dept of Justice against us stating that we threatened her and she fears for her safety. We reciprocated by filing a complaint with the Santa Monica PD stating that she has lied to the DOJ, and that’s a fact. The ONLY communication we EVER sent to her was a demand that she cease and desist contacting us. We have not yet scanned her doj complaint but we will today. We’re still very much concerned about your initial reaction to this. Even Hewlett Packard threw every piece of legal (and illegal) artillery they had against our website about them for months on end and it stood solidly without so much as a hearing. The content about these two women is SO, SO much less controversial than that – The only piece of publicly available info that the courts have held that may not be re-disseminated is a social security number..... Not only did we refrain from posting that, we actually removed the phone numbers of both these broads from public dissemination. That we may disseminate their addresses, which are available to the public from a wide array of public sources anyway, is absolutely centered within the parameters of protected speech, and is not even close to any gray area. They know this, and that’s why they continue to try the last resort – an appeal to a host re their AUP. We’re very sorry you fell for that. We thought you were far more “up” on protected speech issues. We’re still scared of whatever policies you might invoke in the future.

A little while later we had our content on the new hosts, and were just awaiting dns propagation. To be polite, we sent another email to Perkel:

Marc,
We’ve decided to go with another host. If you can give us a few days to get switched over that would be great.
Thanks,

Perkel replied as follows:

OK - but take down the addresses on this web page.

This was curious, as Perkel had already told us HE had removed the address info. We went into the site, found that the address info was still posted, and removed it, thereby conforming to Perkel's request. Here we had Perkel's own email (see above) stating that the address data was allowable, but a new email told us to remove it. After removing it, we sent Perkel another email as follows:

Now you’re saying that the address off again. A couple of emails ago you agreed that these were public documents. Which is it?

Perkel replied by saying that he, personally, didn't want to be bothered with complaints about the addresses.. So why in God's name does he advertise that he'll host controversial content?

We were already done with Perkel, but we wanted to see how he defended his decision to censor the content of his customers. We fired off the following:

Have you ever even spoken with a First Amendment attorney? Pay the $250, spend an hour with one, and address to your satisfaction these basic concerns, because if you continue to represent yourself as a “Free Speech” host, these issues will come up again.....Please clarify this for us: You stated a few hours ago that since these were public documents you would allow them. We have that in writing. Now, several hours later, with nothing changed, you are stating that you want BOTH the typed address AND the photocopy of the public document removed. We want to be very clear that’s what you’re saying, because your decision here will be disseminated publicly. If this is the policy you are going to adopt, then your current and future customers have a right to know what to expect when they give you their money for “free speech” web hosting. Please clarify that you want the photocopy of the public document removed and we will comply immediately. We just need to be absolutely certain that we are not misunderstanding anything here.....

No reply from Perkel, so we emailed again:

We have gone ahead and removed the content that offends you (we’ve altered the public document from the Cal. DOJ). We suggest that it may be in your best interests to DECIDE – are you a free speech host, or not. Clearly you are not. If you don’t want to be, that’s perfectly fine. But you can’t tell customers you are, when you aren’t.

Around midnight that night Perkel shut down all of our domains on his server. Fortunately it had already been moved.

We have asked Perkel for a refund for the unused time on his server. He has stated flatly, "There will be no refund." Marc Perkel has now taken money from us that he has not provided any service for, and that's a fact. Perkel has decided that "he" will be the world's censor, even while advertising that he believes in the First Amendment. --Pretty curious connundrum.

The point that begs to be made, if it hasn't already, is that the First Amendment in this country is in serious trouble. The Internet is rife with fly-by-night, one-man dog and pony shows which will say just about anything to get your money. The question is, will they deliver what they promise? In the case of Marc Perkel and Ctyme Web Hosting, the answer would seem to be a resounding NO. And when they refuse to provide the service they promise to provide, some also refuse to refund the money that was paid to them for that service. Is this plain old, garden-variety dishonesty? In our view, yes, of course it is; it is nothing short of fraud.

We "could" track Perkel down, have him served in the comfort of his home, and sue the dizzy little shit-head in small claims -- maybe even bring criminal charges against him for fraud and false advertising. Certainly the flight alone would negate the settlement. Still, is it a matter of principle that needs to be addressed? Yes. Will we do it? Well, where does he live? Maybe it's a place we've always wanted to see.

The more relevant question is this: If Marc Perkel has taken money from us for which he provided NO SERVICE (it's a FACT that he has), and if Marc Perkel has refused, in writing, to refund that money (it's a FACT that he has), then what's to stop him from doing the very same thing TO YOU?

Answer: Nothing.

We call people who commit these kinds of acts THIEVES.

What other label could possibly fit?

Answer: NONE.

 

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