Reached by Reporters Without Borders, US web hosting provider Go Daddy has denied receiving any form of pressure from the Chinese authorities.
The initial story was published before GoDaddy was directly asked for a response.

Go Daddy said the server hosting the Chinese human rights sites was used to attack other servers, and the company just responded to complaints from clients that were the victims of these attacks, which were a "serious violation of the terms of service." According to Go Daddy: "the shutdown also had nothing to do with bandwidth - our concern directly related to what our investigation into complaints about the server attacks revealed". The company has told the Chinese dissident sites why they have been suspended.

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The server administrator commented as:

1. On August 17th, we received one email to ask for authorization to login to the server withtin 3 days, otherwise the server will be suspended. We did give them the system access authorization on the same day.

The server was disconnected at 2-3pm on August 17, and we spent more than 9 hours to find the reason by calling or sending Email to Godaddy. By 11 pm, representative from Godaddy told that they suspended the server. The reason given in their email notice was that the server running "Anonymous Proxy". We gave them explanation that this proxy is not open to public, thus it will not be a risk to anyone.

The only explanation of suspension given to us on August 17 was running proxy.

2. We did not receive further explanation until Tuesday (August 21), when we received a copy of the complaint from a third party. Since then, we realized the type of problem on the server. It was a port scan from one of the website which has been exploited and installed trojan virus. We are still in the process of further investigation. Our initial conclusion that "Proxy software was not the problem" is correct.

3. Everytime we receive the description from Godaddy, we took immediately action to investigate and make improvement. On this case, Godaddy gave some information that was not relevant to the complaint they received, after we investigated the server based on Godaddy's information.

Godaddy's abnormal process of suspension and lacking proper communication led media many thoughts, the news release of media is understandable. At least, it is a bad business practice.

This server has been under contineously attack itself, it is not in the position of attacking others.  In the initial communication on August 17, we did describe the type of contents we host.

Any server has its weakness and may fall as victim of being attacked or attacking others, it is wrong for hosting companies to disrupt the service without enough communication and investigation.

****Update on August 29

After one of the website (64tianwang) has moved to another server in different company, the technical support of this site received similar complaints, i.e. third party websites complain that they were attacked by the IP hosting 64tianwang.

After investigation, we believe third party's log are results of  TCP ACK FLOOD attacks,  the source IP was spoofed. The attacks were definitely NOT from this server.

We also investigated the logfile on the server disconnected by Godaddy, we have not found the attacking to other sites. We highly recommend Godaddy to check the logs on swicth before they disconnect the server.

A technical fact: Spamers can easily use faked email address to send emails to others. Hackers can use TCP ACK FLOOD to attack other sites by using faked Ips. When an ISP company receives complaints, it must check its own logfiles before blame its customers. In Godaddy��s case, it obviously did not do enough investigation.