Indo attack bloggers yet want them to work for them for free

Fuck off. Seriously guys, go fuck yourselves.

As has been noted elsewhere, the Indo have had a nice aul go at bloggers for the past while, even making up stuff about Beaut.ie yet at the same time they’ve been approaching people to blog on their site. For free. First of all, for free? I’d blog for free for the Irish Times (only if they paid me to do something else for a lot) but not for anyone else and my god would you honestly associate yourself with that lot. I don’t want the readership of the Indo as my personal audience, I’m quite happy with the better though smaller crowd that hang around here.

43 Responses to “Indo attack bloggers yet want them to work for them for free”

  1. Sinéad says:

    I can’t believe hosting365. Disgraceful.

    As for the indo, if it looks like a tabloid and smells like a tabloid etc., etc.,

  2. Green Ink says:

    Methinks the Indo is about to eat itself.

  3. […] I wish I could say go read Beaut.ie (been buying a bit of make up meself recently shock horror!) but anyway their host company got a dose of the willies (oh that is rather beautiful – I’m keeping it) and as for the Indo and the rubbish they are printing all week – from someone who has had the indo hanging around my site digging and nicking stuff I can only add sure they have bloggers working for them for free anyway!!! […]

  4. Rahood says:

    from thumped.com/
    Krystal(beaut.ie)
    “hosting365 cut us off yesterday without warning because, ironically, I’d been complaining about their poor service. This prompted them to realise the site was busy, was taking resources on a shared server (which is, funnily enough, what a website is meant to do, I would assume) and demand we move to a dedicated server – which of course we can’t afford. So we’re in the process of having the domain name pointed to new hosting, which can take up to 48 hours to propagate. They won’t turn it back on in the meantime, so there is currently no site. It’s a shitty way to do business, and nothing to do with Katy French – except of course, if traffic surged higher because of that ‘article’. There’s been a lot of fighting and threats today, with us having no access to our data but it’s getting sorted and we should be back up and running on a new hosting service in the next couple of days.”

    So fear not Ladies if beaut has any luck they will be rescued by a Blacknight.
    As for the Indo..It’s not fit to line a birdcage.

  5. M Buckley says:

    Perhaps they are trying to gather enough material for a searing news story?

  6. Adam says:

    What did the original article say about beaut.ie?

  7. ams says:

    Its a really unfair article by the Indo. They might want to dig through blogorrahs archives while they’re at it and blame the demise of the site on the piss-pulling they did.

  8. Lynnie says:

    Adam – from independent.ie:

    “A high-profile beauty website which hosted negative comments about model Katy French is offline.

    Just one day after the Evening Herald revealed some of the comments posted by bloggers on the website, it went offline.

    Fans of the popular website are now greeted with a message from its creators explaining that it has been shut down due to a dispute between them and their hosting company.

    […]as recently as one month ago, French was forced to defend herself on the now-shut website in a bid to silence her critics and attempted to enlighten people about the difficulties facing models and the realities of her industry.

    Dozens of anonymous bloggers referred to the stunning Assets beauty as “ugly” and a “non-entity”, with one particularly bitter person questioning whether she had undergone a frontal lobotomy.

    “Or maybe there was nothing there to remove in the first place,” said the blogger.

    Another user, masquerading under the pseudonym Lavajonation, discussed the promotional modelling industry.

    “I suppose it’s as close to catwalk modelling as glamour modelling is!

    “I guess they are glamour models, except that they don’t quite take all their clothes off and you don’t need to be goodlooking for that because no one looks at your face, right???,” said the poster.

    Courageous Ms French (24) bravely challenged her critics on the site in October. “I can understand how the rest of you might not see it as it is swamped by the tabloid image of me, that yes, I do have a part in orchestrating,” she admitted.

    “If I or any other Irish model were to wait for an editorial in Vogue I probably wouldn’t be chatting to you know (sic) as I wouldn’t be able to afford the phone bill,” she added.”

  9. kirstie says:

    the hosting365 thing and the poor auld katy french thing actually are completely separate – though possibly their decision to pull us without informing us first, was to do with a traffic surge due to the not so blind indo item, but not actually because of it.

    We’d been complaining to h365 for a while about the site being slow and unresponsive, and the cutoff was to do with that. Anyway I shall say no more because we’re considering legal action against them. The pricks.

  10. aphrodite says:

    You forgot to add Kirstie that we’re also considering legal action against the Indo. Want to represent us Damien?

  11. Dave says:

    Sue them all!

    I fucking hate this idea that because she’s died bad things people said about her previously should go unsaid. What a joke.

  12. Adam says:

    Well the tabloid’s usual approach is that you can’t libel the dead so they go to town on them.

    I wouldn’t rule that out at this early stage but the Independent have always held French on a pedestal (whether you think that’s justified or not is irrelevant).

    Don’t read the Herald so I don’t even know what they said about beaut.ie – I wouldn’t give it an ounce of credibility but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous to the reputation of the site.

  13. squid says:

    It’s truly despicable that the independent would use this woman’s death to promote it’s agenda against bloggers though. There was a piece about the evil bloggers in the paper again yesterday.

    I can’t say I am well versed on who Katy French was, however no parent should have to bury their child…ever and the family have my sympathies.

    should the beaut.ie girls decide to sue the independent then they have my best wishes.

  14. Adam says:

    It’s funny that they see bloggers as some organised groups with a specific agenda rather than what bloggers are – normal, independent people who express their own opinions publicly.

  15. kirstie says:

    aww, thanks! yiz are only fabillis and it’s been really heartwarming to read the messages of support and help that we’ve been getting from de blogosphere.

  16. Looks like time for another campaign:

    “hosting365-are-a-bunch-of-fucking-arseholes”

    What do you reckon?

  17. Green Ink says:

    Oh Bock I’m there.

  18. simon says:

    Good luck girls.

  19. squid says:

    If i recall boards.ie had the same problem with speed when it came to hosting 365

  20. […] devoted thousands of words to it. It’s so heartbroken that it felt the need to publish an untrue story about an Irish web-sites, headed “Stars flock to Katy’s Bebo […]

  21. Steve says:

    No, they didn’t – http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055060684&highlight=hosting365

    The Boards.ie issues were improved by all new hardware which just coincided with a change of host.

  22. Sue their miserable, hypocritical asses!

  23. Richard Hearne says:

    ‘sue, sue, sue’ – why cant people sort these things out without having to always consider legal approaches? Sad. From the limited info here I doubt this would have any legal legs anyhow, most especially so if you were warned that your current set up could not handle the resources required.

    If H365 did indeed let you know that you needed to move to a dedicated server why didn’t you? If you have enough traffic to warrant the move and aren’t earning enough to afford it then maybe you should consider looking at how your business earns its keep. There are plenty of clever people in Ireland who I’m sure would offer some advice over an informal email or two.

    Just my €0.02

  24. Dave says:

    Richard I believe most people were talking about taking legal action against the Independent.

  25. squid says:

    I wonder how much advertising revenue did beaut.ie lose during the time immediately after the rug was pulled from under them.

  26. What you really need to do, Richard, is take a step back and read what people actually said, before using words like “sad”.

    Just saying.

  27. Richard Hearne says:

    I see 2 comments above from I presume the 2 girls from beaut.ie – both refer to taking legal action against the independent and h365 respectively.

    I have no knowledge of the indo issue, but from reading the limited response from h365 I’ll happily eat my hat if there is any case to be heard WRT hosting issues.

    If you cant handle the traffic your site gets then dont cry to the hosting provider because you didn’t upgrade your infrastructure. More especially so if the host alerted you to this issue. I mean seriously –

    This prompted them to realise the site was busy, was taking resources on a shared server (which is, funnily enough, what a website is meant to do, I would assume) and demand we move to a dedicated server – which of course we can’t afford.

    Sorry girls – but servers don’t have infinite capacity. You shouldn’t hook up your mini to a forty tonne trailer and expect to go too far.

    If you’re really stuck for the money I might be interested in helping out with a view to monetising some of that traffic 😉

  28. What the Indo fails to mention is that the bebo site’s comments are moderated, and therefore wouldn’t feature any criticism of this dead model.

    What the Indo should do is look on some of the forums to see if critics really have been silenced.

  29. […] Indo is a fucking rag. Look, everyone thinks so. Bock, Twenty, Fatmammycat, Mulley, CupidStunt. […]

  30. Justin Mason says:

    If Hosting365 think you need to move up to a dedicated server over traffic from a _WordPress weblog_, ditch them — they obvs don’t have a clue how to run hosting. pathetic.

    I use DreamHost, myself — super-cheap and I use them for backup and for my mp3 blog. Alternatively I’m sure Michele could offer yis a good deal, and he’s going to be a good deal more local and responsive 😉

  31. M Buckley says:

    Technological changes are so bewildering,
    many bloggers spend a lot of time
    trying to get the system to function
    smoothly.

    I found this group today and chatting
    with members or seeing if they offer
    lectures for the public might help to
    make sense of trends.

    http://www.ctvr.ie/recruitment.php

  32. Steve says:

    @Justin – when you factor wordpresses ‘poor’ database efficiency, and the huge amount of traffic that site was receiving, I think it’s fair to say an entry level shared hosting plan is perhaps not the ideal place for it. The problem with hosting these days is that everyone believes the false marketing hype from the huge hosts about ‘unlimited’ everything for 2.99. If you read the AUP’s from dreamhost, bluehost, hostgator, or indeed any of the big hosting providers, they will set CPU time limits on the service, to protect all the other users striving to get maximum value for their money. If you want dedicated CPU time, you need dedicated infrastructure.

  33. aphrodite says:

    Ah you’re alright Richard – we would have had no problem paying for our own server. Point is Hosting365 never told us the situation was crucial and pulled us without notice for a traffic spike. Plus their service and communication was bad beyond belief. Our site was slow for weeks and weeks – we kept on telling them and they kept on fobbing us off.
    Plus they actually threatened us with legal action first.
    And then they apologised for their behaviour. In an email.
    Sure if they want to pretend everything was above board from their end, off they go – point is, it wasn’t.
    So enough of this crap about us being too cheap to move to a dedicated server. Don’t make me laugh – we were crying out for a solution

  34. Justin Mason says:

    Steve — you make things sound so much worse than they have to be.

    I’ve had a tech support person from Dreamhost get in touch with me *personally* by email, because he noticed that my WordPress blog was getting slashdotted. He suggested various tweaks to help it deal with the slashdotting — enabling WP-Cache and so on. All were spot on advice — I would have gone for it, except my blog was actually hosted elsewhere, not on DH at that time!

    Note, he suggested ways to cope with it, rather than suggesting I upgrade to a more costly plan then kicking me off.

    Dreamhost is a good example of baseline hosting nowadays. For god’s sake, it’s free to host with DH for a year with the right affiliate code! how much more basic can you get? if an Irish ISP can’t compete with *free* hosting, what *can* they compete with?

  35. Richard Hearne says:

    @aphrodite –

    …and demand we move to a dedicated server – which of course we can’t afford.

    Perhaps you were mis-quoted above?

  36. Steve says:

    @Justin – Take your point entirely. We’re not ‘wordpress’ experts and no doubt there are things we could have done to help more. That said, the customer was emailed and phoned by one of our team on the 28th November, warning about the situation, suggesting a review of the site, and offering options on dedicated hosting. DB access was suspended on the 5th December, as we had not heard back from the customer and the site was running many thousand concurrent DB queries, taking an average of 31 seconds each to resolve, effectively crippling a large DB server for other customers who use it. The Senior engineer on case at the time made the call to suspend access to that server for that account due to the impact, he wasn’t up to speed on the historical stuff, and the people who were, were only informed after the fact. This is unfortunate, but our engineers of course need discretionary authority in the case of service impact for a large number of customers. The next reply we had was after we suspended access to the DB server.

  37. […] hammering among the online community, no more so than in the Irish blogosphere. As Damien reports, they’re attacking bloggers while at the same time wanting them to work for free… not quite how it works, that, is […]

  38. […] As Mulley points out the Independent, if we didn’t know already, is a quite reprehensible rag. […]

  39. […] wonder the Independent wants bloggers to work for them for free. They can’t even afford original reporters! At least, not who can […]

  40. […] been well covered that some Independent News & Media staffers are fond of appropriating bits of writing they find on […]

  41. […] Attacks on blogs and bloggers yet they approached bloggers and asked them work for free […]

  42. […] a couple of blogs today about the attitude of the Irish Independent towards bloggers. Damian Mulley mentions here that they’re looking for people to blog for them on their site for free. While over at Maman […]

  43. Leisa Nordenson says:

    My God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insight at the end there, not leave it with we leave it to you to decide.