Claims that pressure from media companies forced the temporary shutdown of the controversial Bugmenot anti-registration site are utterly false, the site’s former hosting company told ClickZ. Bugmenot lets users share user IDs & passwords and therefore bypass compulsory registration at many many popular content sites. The site’s anonymous users had implied that media pressure was behind it going offline last week. But Bugmenot’s former hosting company said that “Nobody approached us, we had no idea what the site even did, nor had we heard of it before.” Brent Oxley, spokesman for Hostgator, said that the heavy traffic to Bugmenot had crashed his hosting company’s Web server multiple times and that is the reason the site was deactivated. Bugmenot has since switched to NearlyFreeSpeech.net, a hosting company in Texas, and reappeared online.
Bugmenot’s owner reportedly says that media company sites that forced registration have begun spidering the bugmenot site to autoblock shared accounts. According to Bugmenot’s site, the motivation behind its service is a philosophical objection to what it believes is a breach of privacy. It says forced registration 9s “contrary to the fundamental spirit of the Net”, and a pointless, annoying waste of time. Between 10,000 and 15,000 unique visitors reportedly use the site daily.