GoDaddy recently told an anti-abortion group called Texas Right to Life it had 24 hours to find a new hosting provider for the site it set up for “whistleblowers” to report violations of the state’s new abortion restrictions. It seems the organization found someone willing to host the site: Epik.
NPR reported that GoDaddy refused to host the site in question because it violated its terms of service, which prohibit customers from collecting “any non-public or personally identifiable information” about “any other person or entity without their express prior written consent.”
The report also cited efforts from Reddit, TikTok, and GitHub users to inundate the site with fake reports to make it harder for accounts of actual people receiving abortions to gain attention. Texas Right to Life asked people to send it needles; it received a haystack in response.
Ars Technica reported that Texas Right to Life sought to revive the website on Digital Ocean after it was kicked off GoDaddy’s platform, but that hosting provider has similar rules about collecting private information without someone’s consent, so the site was taken down from there as well.
But that wasn’t the end of Texas Right to Life’s efforts to bring the website back online. The Verge reported that it’s currently hosted by Epik, the hosting provider of last resort for controversial sites like the Parler, Gab, and 8chan social networks that other hosts turned away.
The site in question appears to be online: It returns a notification from a WordPress plugin called Wordfence claiming “Your access to this site has been limited by the site owner” and “access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons” when visited from New York.
It’s possible that Texas Right to Life implemented those precautions to prevent automated submissions from tools like Pro-Life Buster developed specifically to interfere with the site’s operation; the organization could also be in the process of re-configuring the site.
Either way it’s clear that being kicked off two hosting providers wasn’t enough to keep the privacy-invading site offline, and with Epik’s record of standing by platforms that other companies want nothing to do with, it seems unlikely that the site will be taken down any time soon.
