Written by Defcronyke Webmaster (a.k.a. ethelwyn on the hostcell.net forum) on 2011-06-20
Censorship is a popular tactic among oppressive dictators to keep the public from knowing what the dictator deems potentially harmful, either to their own image, their country's image, or if they think people shouldn't be able to access specific knowledge that might allow them to grow informed opinions about things that the dictator doesn't want the public thinking or talking about. Some dictators argue that they are using censorship because the things being censored are blasphemous, or would be corrupting to the soul of the individual. They fear that the public might rise against them if people are free to make informed decisions.
Hostcell.net is a popular web hosting service which has been around for a while now, and was always a great place to run simple small websites for free. It had a smart business model which attracted a lot of clients, because the basic hosting package was truly free, and if people needed more storage space or features for their website later, they could pay or post a certain number of messages in the support forum to earn the account. If the user had a premium account and did not meet their forum posting requirements, advertisements would appear on all the pages on their website.
Merriam-Webster definition of the word free:
"having no obligations (as to work) or commitments"
example: "I'll be free this evening"
And that's what the free account was. Free with no obligations or commitments. No ads, no forum posting requirements, no payment required in time or money. The true freeness is what attracted the majority of clients to the service, because most similar "free" services had unfavourable restrictions such as mandatory banner and/or popup ads on every free webpage. Hostcell had done the concept of a free service right.
However, the owner of the popular webhosting service became caught up with family life and his day job, and he could no longer afford to continue running hostcell.net, so he passed over the website to a new owner, which was a person with the screen name "SeriesN" who had created an account on the service only a few months prior to the ownership switch.
Soon after, the new owner sent out an email to all users of hostcell.net:
Greetings.
I am SeriesN, New Administrator of Hostcell.net,
I am re-configuring this service and making some big and small and changes. If you haven't noticed, The main Community forum went under a pretty nice update. Please take a look at http://forums.hostcell.net/.
As we are planning to change how this site will run, the First thing we have in mind is to make this forum active and alive. I was really sad after noticing that this forum is really slow and not even 1/5 th of our total members are active on the forum. Now I know that it wast a must before but now If you want to keep your account active then you have to make at least 2 post on this forum on every 2 week. And this post has to be a true post with a minimum of 2 sentence or 20 words (what ever comes first).
We will also be running some contest on this forum and give away some amazing prizes, so you must keep your eyes and ears open. I have more plan for this service and you will be notified via various forum posts. I will rarely send you an email or 2 to keep your guys alive.
Hope to see you guys active on the community.
Regards,
SeriesN
Of course, whenever ownership of a website changes, you can expect things on the site to change as well, because the new owner will undoubtedly have some new ideas to bring to the table. This is not inherently a bad thing, and often a bit of change is really good to refresh the newness of a website.
What the new webmaster had done was turn the once free account into an account which required additional obligations for the user's website to remain online.
For something to truly be free, there is much more to consider than whether or not it requires monetary payments. One example of this is the concept of bartering. When you trade one service or material for another, this would never be accurately described as someone offering something for free. A person's time, skill, or traded material, is undeniably considered a form of payment.
So the new policy on the once free hosting service, was transformed into a bartering policy. Users would now have to trade their time and words as payment for the "free" account.
Now, there is nothing wrong with a new owner of a website deciding to remove a free service from their site, or turning a free service into a paid service. This is to be expected because owners who take over someone else's work generally don't have as much vested interest in the project as the original owner did, and may not share the exact same values either. Not a problem at all.
What is a problem is when someone tries to confuse people by saying that a barter-oriented service is actually a free service. Bartering something is never the same as offering it for free. When someone says something is free, it should be free, and SeriesN continues to advertise the basic account as a free account. I take great issue with this because I respect accountability and truthfulness. Tricking people into thinking barter is the same as free undermines the whole concept of free.
If you stuck around long enough to read to this part, you're certainly wondering when I'll get to the point and back up my outrageous claim that hostcell.net values censorship.
Well, upon receiving the email posted above, I decided that I needed to give some feedback regarding the new "free" account policy. What I got in response to my feedback was some users agreeing with my point of view, while others saying they didn't understand what my problem was. These types of responses were exactly what I was expecting, as this is always what happens when people voice opinions on all public forums. There will always be some who agree and some who disagree with every opinion.
What I didn't expect was that the webmaster would pay attention to my feedback, as feedback in forums rarely lead to actual change in operations. And pay attention he did. He accused me of bashing him even though I never used any ad hominem attacks in my feedback. He also said he would welcome me bashing him as much as I wanted in the future as it would make the forum more active, which is the reason he made the policy changes in the first place. As he was using the words "bash me" to mean "criticize my new policy", I continued debating his concept of free. During the debate, he really showed his true ignorance and bad character. Once he had enough with my debate, he promptly banned me from making any further posts, and proceeded to delete my entire thread, as well as all the comments I had posted on one of his threads. None of my comments attacked his character in any way, and he removed my comments from the forum because he realized his responses to my comments made him look bad, and threatened the future of his website.
Luckily, I screen-capped both threads before they were censored, and I am posting them on the next few pages of this article so the world can see the true nature of the new ownership at hostcell.net.
I won't stand by and let my opinions be censored when they are not offensive in any way and break no national or international laws. Especially when the censoring is a tactic used to save face by an administrator who is diluting the concept of the word free.
Click to see screen caps of the original uncensored threads: Next Page
Comments
2011-08-03 04:50:54 EST
Subject: Hostcell going wonky
Comment:
I'm not rightly too sure what is going wrong at hostcell.net but the new
owner Series-N is somewhat 'hormonal'.
It might be he is simply
inexperienced at the niceties of running a public web server, and having to
interact with users and potential customers; certainly any company thinking
of having hostcell as a hosting service will probably see the nature of his
'support' and run a mile!
The fear is that he has a bit of a hissy
fit and deletes all of the accounts and domains (then claims hardware
failure/virus etc.)
I have found another - genuinely-free hosting
service in Germany - whch is a shame as I am anticipating having to
register a domain name and paying for a service as my web site is getting
popular all-of-a-sudden. I would have had hostcell host it on their
hardware, but unfortunately however stable the hardware is, I don't think
the owner is sufficiently stable.
Perhaps getting off the caffeine
and pizza and getting out a bit, even to run a few miles every now