You all remember CharityHost, right?
Earlier this year they had a giveaway and a LowEndTalk member won. He used the FTP storage space for his personal porn stash, and when Charity Host snooped his files, they found it. They booted his account, which lead to a lot of drama. There was even a web site created about it.
Then they rebranded as ExactVM. Before being sold to someone called “Josh”.
And now there’s more.
According to LowEndTalk member @Donald2018:
I conducted a “mystery shopper” test to verify their “new owner” claims. The results were shocking—involving bait-and-switch tactics, infrastructure that still links to Andre, and serious privacy violations.
Long story short, the VPS @Donald2018 was trash. People who won servers in various giveaways CharityHost ran got respectable performance – probably so they could impress other possible subscribers with their YABS.
After posting about this, CharityHost promptly terminated Donald2018’s account, citing this in their AUP:
Use the Services to compete with us or damage our services. Harass, annoy, intimidate, or threaten our employees or agents. Disparage, tarnish, or harm us or the Services.
So Let’s Dig Into That
This sort of “gag clause” is actually illegal in the USA. The federal Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016 (CRFA) voids “gag clauses” in standard form consumer contracts that prohibit or penalize reviews of goods/services. Quoting Wikipedia:
The Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016 invalidates non-disparagement clauses in certain “form contracts” (as defined in the statute) and makes it unlawful for a person to offer or enter into a form contract containing a non-negotiable non-disparagement clause. Violations of this prohibition are enforced by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general. The law does not limit the ability of a person or business to file a civil cause of action for defamation, libel, slander, or any similar cause of action under State law.
In other words, you can’t have a clause in your TOS that says “you agree to only say nice things about us”.
Perhaps @Donald2018 will sue, and that will be the cliffhanger for this season of CharityHost: The Neverending Drama.
Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.
Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.
His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.
You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.
Using charity for porn is an abuse of charity.
Hi Raindog308 and the LET community,
I am the new owner of the CharityHost.org business; his was a very recent business transaction. I am coming up-to-speed with the LET and NS communities. I am not here to cause further controversy, but as the new owner of this business, I need to address these concerns. It’s an unfortunate scenario I step into here, but I’m doing my best to navigate this with a desire to communicate to the user base.
The facts are this user signed up for the service with the hostname “host.charity” which is a defaming website targeting CharityHost.org. The VPS service was discontinued and the money was refunded. We choose not to do business with this user, we will not platform such a site and that is our right to make that business decision. In so doing, there was no silencing of his review, he did all of that on external sites. Given the order was effectively cancelled, money returned, there’s nothing to this legal claim.
In terms of the rest of this controversy, there is very little substance.
1) The past controversy was relating to how a previous AUP abuse claim was handled where the user was storing/serving porn (the AUP violation) and community concern over the privacy of the user. That’s what the host.charity site was dedicated to. All of that happened before my ownership. As a general practice, we don’t access customer data; we work with the VPS environment itself. I’m not going to revisit decisions made before the ownership change, so there is nothing to discuss on this prior event.
2) The business was sold from Andre to me. We are fully transacted and in a short transition period. That’s the truth and I’ve stated it very clearly on NS. Claims to the contrary are mere speculation from distrust. Mainly this single user has continued to push this narrative, keeping old drama circulating and stirring up concern on the forums. I can understand distrust and concern, but it seems aimed more at stirring up concern than clarifying facts, and is ultimately working to tear down the brand rather than address any issue or be of service to the community. The business has changed hands, and I’m addressing inherited issues as they come up. This is a reasonable response and normal for a business transition. We’ll continue isolating problems and resolving them for the benefit of our customers as we are given opportunity.
3) The issue at hand … the site host.charity continues to attempt to defame the business, mostly making things up. There was what I recognize as a legitimate report of poor disk performance on the user’s VPS. As this article points out, there have been other recent users reporting good YABS reports. Still, the user had an experience they didn’t expect, and I can recognize that. It is the user’s right to complain about that or not. He chose to take it as validation of his own biases against the business. He draws conclusions that are factually wrong. I actually am thankful to know that there was an issue so that we can work to resolve it. My only issue is what the user chose to do with this information. He crosses the line between relaying his concerns and experiences, to making factual claims against the business that are false.
More performance reports will likely be posted in the near future showing the capabilities of the servers, showing that this user’s wild assertions and conclusions are not accurate. The reality is, there was likely some improper IO limit imposed inadvertently in an automated provisioning. I can own that as an issue and had the user submitted a support request we could have investigated the poor performance situation and resolved it.
If there is any claim here, it is one of harassment and defamatory speech. He claims we are scamming and there are further claims in these posts about money laundering (due to doubt about the ownership change). That’s a serious accusation, and the claims being made have no factual basis. They amount to attempts at reputational harm without any real‑world cause. The only thing of any legitimate concern is that poor IO response on his VPS, which he could have sought out remediation for, but instead he chose this other route.
False claims:
*False Claim – no ownership change, Andre has just renamed himself “Josh”, accusations of money laundering involved in a false change of ownership. This is patently false, outrageously defamatory claims with no basis. Andre and I (Josh) actually have quite different communication styles, despite claims to the opposite it is quite clear to see from a non-biased observer.
*False Claim – False advertising of NVMe drives but really is selling HDDs, a scam to rip people off. Reality: This is a false assumption, explained above with IO results caused by a simple misconfiguration. There is no further evidence for the claims, in fact I have clear evidence of the fact they are NVMe drives that we offer where stated, it is listed as such in the hypervisor host. We also offer separate SSD and HDD service offerings.
*False Claim – User was “doxxed”. Reality: This is a serious and very false claim. During the termination of services email, we referred to the user as his NS forum name, which was already publicly linked to host.charity. This was not a public communication, it was merely a private email back to the user informing of the termination of services and refund. It was accurate and private direct communication.
I’m here looking to have good interactions with a business community, and what I’m faced with is gossip. There are those in the forums (NS and I see the same postings here in LET) who seem to have their own motives for continual disparagement of this business rather than elevation of services for the community. That’s sad. Regardless, I’m here trying to learn from the community. I choose to take the good that I can from these very poor interactions and strive to make our CH service better for our customers.
If you look up my response posts to date, you will see that I’m continually saying that I’m here to learn from the community, understand where we can enhance our services and interact with our customer base. That’s still my goal, and I hope to have some truly positive interactions in the near future.
Thanks,
Josh
@Josh,
I can’t say I envy your position here. I see that you are going for clarity, and appreciate that you have stated your case clearly. I also know that people who defame seldom stop defaming and keep on coming up with lies unless some kind of lawsuit prevents them from doing so. That solution, of course, requires time, money and lawyers.
I hope this is the extent of the drama you have to deal with, as being in the charity sector is often difficult enough without all the “vampires” coming in and trying to suck the good of the act up in some kind of negative energy soup drain. If I can be of any service to your, at least to me, seemingly goodwill endeavors, let me know.