Our company provides tools to help people put together pages for their businesses. Our free tool has been used to create over million page tabs on Facebook. Unfortunately but predictably, sometimes bad people use our app. Like spammers.

Overnight, our domain was blacklisted by Spamhaus because one of our pages contained spam. (Anybody want a free iPad?)

We run our infrastructure on Heroku, and use Bluehost for domain names. Well, as soon as Bluehost recieved notice from Spamhaus, they shut off the DNS for our domain. All million plus pages, gone in the blink of a DNS propagation.

Thankfully we were able to switch over to [appname].heroku.com for now and most of the pages are back, but we have paying customers who are in the dark because they rely on our custom domain name.

Our product, that over a million people rely on, suddenly ceased to exist. No advance notice. Nothing we could have done to stop it. Because of ONE bad apple.

This kind of thing will happen in SOPA world, if we let ourselves get there. But instead of being able to call my registrar and yell at them, I would have had to call the government, and oh-by-the-way they might fine or imprison me for having hosted spam.

Let me end with a practical, really-important-to-me-right-now question: is there any possible way to not get randomly nuked by Spamhaus?