Ryan Porter, the owner and operator of server hosting service ExtremeIS, and the man accused of hijacking some of the domains of one of his customers, recently responded to the accusations against him in an e-mail I received yesterday.
I recently reported how Porter allegedly hijacked the domains Filesharingplace.com and Filesharingdownloads.com from on of his customers, Mavol, who now runs the sites filesharingplace.be, showip.be, imgboot.com, and torrentscan.com,
The briefly retell the story, Mavol started renting 2 servers from ExtremeIS in 2003, and it was just last year when he tried to switch hosts that he discovered just what Porter had done.
Apparently the owner of ExtremeIS, Ryan Porter, decided to register the domains he hosted on the servers he rented out in his own name rather than in the names of the people who he rented servers to. Pretty shady right?
Well, I wrote to Porter and asked him to respond to the article and the claims of wrongdoing that Mavol has alleged. His answers seem pretty straightforward and almost make sense at first until you realize the guys supposed to be just a server host, not some venture capitalist extraordinary who people would necessarily seek out to manage their domain in some sort of “partnership” deal that he claims it was.
After reviewing his reply to the allegations, I then forwarded it to Mavol to get his response to what Porter had to say. The following is a merger of these two conversations, in a point and counterpoint style, that I think sheds much needed light on just what happened.
Porter:
I entered into a partnership with “Mavol” in late 2003, early 2004. The agreement was for me to provide a server in exchange for full advertising rights on the website. There was no domain in use at the time as they were previously hosted with some sort of free hosting service and used a subdomain for the address. As with any partnership the duties were divided up among the partners.
I was responsible for the following:
Provide Server/s, Manage Server/s, Manage all Advertising including but not limited to updating advertising code on website, responding to advertising inquiries, etc…, Manage all financial aspects of the website, this included receiving revenue payments from advertisers, paying for servers, purchasing software, providing a monthly payment to “Mavol”.
Mavol was responsible for:
Provide website content, Manage the forums, Act as the “front man” for the website.
Mavol:
I never heard of this “partnership” thing before. I do not suggest anyone contacts ExtremeIS about Custom Plans (which the site says is available), because apparently it is not a “Custom Plan” but a “Partnership”.
The deal I made was this: Free hosting (two servers) including full management in return I would place one banner at the bottom of my three or so most popular pages.
We were indeed hosted once by a free hosting business before. I still have a good relation with that owner.
How can I act as the “front man” for the site if I own it, I ask myself?
Porter:
I purchased the domains filesharingplace.com/net and filesharingdownloads.com/net and several other variations of the domain with my own money, Mavol never paid for then as he likes to state.
Mavol:
I purchased the filesharingplace.com domain with donations I had received from members. Members who have been with us since the start of FSP will remember the fundraising period, and the donators themselves too of course! This was well before I even came in contact with ExtremeIS.
I transferred the domain to Ryan under the understanding he was an official registrar. I was charged once a large amount of money for domains, I still have the PayPal invoice.
Porter:
Mavol was never a client of ExtremeIS.com, Mavol never purchased any services from me or my company, he presented me with a partnership opportunity, one which I now find myself on the short end of.
Mavol:
Ryan confirms that his hosting business does not exist, or that he never even registered me as a customer.
ExtremeIS is using the domain I bought, using all content I wrote and I haven’t access to the servers of my site. I wonder how anyone could see ExtremeIS being on the short end of anything.
Porter:
Mavol was fully aware of the popup on the klr startpage and has been since it’s inception.
Mavol:
I’m still waiting for an email notifying me of the change. I became aware of the popup after Ryan also put activex installers, trojans etc on the startpage. He did this multiple times. KLR users can unfortunately confirm this.
Porter:
There were at some points popups and interstitial ads on other parts of the website, we came to a mutual agreement to keep a single popup on the startpage only as that is the page that earns revenue for the rest of the site.
Mavol:
I still don’t agree with the popup. Ryan simply put the popup back after I removed it, he also locked me out of the servers until I agreed not to remove it anymore.
Porter:
Mavol has received a healthy monthly payment as a result of the advertising since our partnership began.
Mavol:
Naturally, after Ryan put all his ads on the site, I insisted any money left after deducting costs be sent to me and not kept by Ryan himself. This was of course not that case. Excuses about exceptional high costs or exceptional low ad revenue reduced payments to nothing.
Porter:
Mavol left on his own accord, he was not “kicked out” of anything. Mavol moved his domain “filesharingplace.be” to a new server without any warning and then started deleting all of the files on the filesharingplace.com server. Additionally he deleted all backups from my backup server and is now making slanderous comments to anyone who will listen.
Mavol:
Funny thing is the first sentence is 100% correct: I moved all domains I owned (http://imgboot.com, http://showip.be, http://torrentscan.com, http://filesharingplace.be) to my own server. The next day all passwords of the FSP.com and FSD.com servers were changed and my forum account had been deleted: I had been kicked out for that. Clearly Ryan ended our so called partnership: Not me.
Not sure why I would delete my site, sounds silly to me.
If your backup server got hacked then it’s regrettable but blaming me is absurd. Was the password “god” or something?
Reading Porter’s comments and then Mavol’s rebuttals just proves what a jerk Ryan is. The guy’s a server host for heaven’s sake, and concocts some sort of partnership arrangement in his mind when in all reality Mavol agreed to place a few of the guys ad banners on some of his pages.
Porter comments that he is some sort of power manager, that he will “Manage all Advertising including but not limited to updating advertising code on website, respond to advertising inquiries, etc…, and manage all financial aspects of the website.” Last time I checked it’s not that hard to do any of the things you mentioned. So in return for a “50%” stake in the domains Mavol gets precisely what? A server host. Wow, what a deal that is.
The real kicker in all of this too, that I was totally unaware of, is the fact that Mavol used DONATED funds from members to pay for the domain hosting. Now that makes Porter look even lousier.
“Members who have been with us since the start of FSP will remember the fundraising period, and the donators themselves too of course! This was well before I even came in contact with ExtremeIS,” Mavol noted.
“I transferred the domain to Ryan under the understanding he was an official registrar. I was charged once a large amount of money for domains, I still have the PayPal invoice.”
Hmm, so when did it become a “partnership” I’d like to know. My money’s on just after he received those donated funds from Mavol.
So, again I solicit everyone’s help in both boycotting these hijacked domains as well as spreading the word of Porter’s unethical business practices.
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hate to be kind of a dick here but all this is his own fault. he never should have transferred ownership of the domains without a written agreement of some kind.. this is like 2 high school kids with a lemonade stand