AOL redeemed itself
I am tardy in my follow-up to my previous post wherein I blogged about AOL blocking a client’s site, opticalshopofwestport.com, from appearing on any computer using AOL’s ISP services.
Normally I would not care. Few people in the store’s trading area, Westport CT and the surrounding towns, use AOL ISP services. Those that do are unlikely to be Optical Shop of Westport (OSW) customers. However, the store owner and the shop use the AOL dial-up ISP service. This is because the OSW’s telephone provider, not at&t nor Cablevision, does not offer ISP service. It is an issue that the site’s owner could not see her own website.
I was contacted by telephone shortly after blogging about this by an AOL executive who described the cause of the block and informed me that the problem was fixed. This was unexpected and quite welcome.
He explained that OSW uses GoDaddy to host the website. GoDaddy uses virtualization to share hardware among multiple low traffic websites, thereby minimizing cost and hardware requirements. The websites hosted on a single physical server share one IP address. (This I knew.)
What I did not know was that one of the 58 other sites that shared OSW’s IP address was designated by AOL as suspicious. My understanding is that this is because the site is intentionally or inadvertently linked to spammers or malware vectors. So AOL blocked everyone with that physical IP address rather than just the offending site.
I would think that a simple adjustment to AOL’s DNS servers would suffice. Rather than use a bullet to deal with this problem AOL used a large bomb. It works for them. If innocents are hurt by their bomb, in this case OSW and the 57 other non-offending websites, tough.
I am thankful that AOL heard my complaint and resolved the issue for OSW but…
AOL has the technology to deal with this problem. They choose not to. I suspect that their customers are mostly unaware that AOL does not practice net neutrality. I wonder what the FCC would do if they knew.
Well, my, *that*’s interesting. Thanks for sharing the full story. It’s extremely unusual for any AOL exec to reach out to someone online who has a complaint about their service. I know some members of their corporate team follow any blog or news post about AOL (even random, first-hand stories like your own) but never have I heard of them contacting a blogger afterward to discuss the issue further and see what, if anything, can be made right. Highly unusual step for them, so you should count yourself very lucky. As to blocking the entire address range? Ludicrous. They took a hammer to the problem when all they needed was one small, sharp ax….just another typical day at AOL, I guess.