DOT and its meaningless ban on weebly.com
I am a signed-up member of http://weebly.com. Weebly provides free web hosting services. They also have premium (fee based) services for registering domain names, running sophisticated high-end websites involving or offering e-commerce, online payments, high volume traffic / storage etc. I have set up and administer, free of charge, as a part of social service, three simple functional websites on weebly, namely:
1. http://aosc-h.weebly.com/ For the Association of Senior Citizens, Hyderabad (known as Lions Bhavan Association popularly)
2. http://scf-secunderabad.weebly.com/ For Senior Citizens Forum, Secunderabad – A twenty year old SCA that recently won Telangana State Govt Award
3. http://ccrwas.weebly.com/ For Confederation of Cantonment Resident Welfare Associations, Secunderabad. (a seven year old confederation of 70 colony RWAs as members)
However, recently I discovered, some three weeks ago, that the site http://www.weebly.com/ OR http://weebly.com. is not reachable. I had
access to their dashboard (Control Panel of some sort) which I can reach using special UserId and Password, after reaching main weebly.com. That is, their Home Page. This special access helps me add / delete / change content on the websites I manage.
Now this access is gone.
I complained to weebly via their FB page. They replied stating that my ISP has banned access to their website. I checked with a large number of my friends having Internet access via many different ISPs. I learnt only BSNL Broad Band subscribers are having problem. I lodged a complaint with BSNL and followed it up almost on daily basis. Finally I learn that DOT has banned weebly.com due to security reasons.
Not only that websites updating work has been held up but I have to find out an alternate site similar to weebly and move my three websites there, involving a lot of unnecessary work and inconvenience.
My questions are:
· What are the security concerns?
· Why BSNL alone is implementing the ban? (I am able to access weebly via Airtel)
· When websites (content) hosted on weebly are still accessible, why ban only access to their home page and thus users' dashboards?
· If a certain website is banned, is it not the duty of DOT to inform all concerned about the ban through ISPs like BSNL etc?
· Don't you think BSNL is showing scant respect to its BB subscribers?
Can you think of any reasons why DOT is behaving erratically, apparently without any explanations?
