Yet.

Perhaps I made the mistake of calling 1and1 to verify if what I'm doing could have my account closed.  Since my phone call, they have been making my life a living nightmare.  They are playing really dirty right now.  Like in the case above, blocking my admin areas to all my websites on a Friday just before their abuse team closes for the weekend.   Other things are happening as well where I suspect they want me to leave as a customer which is exactly what I'm trying to do. 

Closing websites down due to illegal content shouldn't be an issue and I also agree with the comments above.  However at the heart of all this is their misguided interpretation of the law and perhaps even their own policies that are blindly enforced by script reading employees that probably have no idea what ethical hacking is.  In contrast though, "abuse" teams and policy enforcement should allow for customer communication to verify if the violation was intended. eg. sites compromised. 

At the end of the day, I am learning a hard lesson that you get what you pay for.  If you want the ability to be able to communicate intelligently with competent staff that hosts your online content and a healthy chunk of your online identity, you need to choose companies that charge a little more.

I'm speechless.  I'm numb.  I have so much damn work to do because of this company.  Sometimes I feel like we can never win this battle.  It's looking more and more that what happened to MaxE, will happen to me in a slow death sort of way. 

Update:

The following takes place between my pro-active phone call to the 1and1 "abuse" team to ensure they don't close my account and the email I got today:

From 1and1:
Your contract number:  XXXXXXXX
Your customer ID:  XXXXXXXXX
Our reference:  [Ticket XXXXXXXXXX]
Note:  Your personal 1&1 contract number and your name certify that this e-mail
was sent by 1&1 Internet Inc.

Dear Mr. xxxxxxx,

This is an urgent notice regarding the security of your 1&1 account.

Your 1&1 webspace has been attacked via an insecure software you installed on your webspace.

You will find an analysis of the attack and instructions on how to secure your webspace against future attacks in this e-mail.

In order to impede further attacks, we have disabled these files. Please
note that part of your websites may be impaired.

-----------------------

This was bogus.  I have other accounts running similar software with no warning.  This was targeted.   I lost admin access to all my client websites - 1and1 disabled the joomla admin files.   I called them tonight and the abuse team is closed until Monday.

On a side note, I'm having extreme difficulty trying to transfer my ethical hacking site http://group51.org domain name to a new provider.  This is my second round - "Pending Registry Approval".   1and1 systems are denying my domain transfer even though I provided the auth code and followed all the security steps. 

My 2012 mission is to get off of 1and1 servers.

Thanks for the tip BillV.  I spent my last Saturday morning reading ToS's for a handful of different companies which included a phone call. (where those companies answered their phone).  I also read reviews online and GoDaddy didn't rank high. Other companies flat out said "we don't want ethical hacking content" and refused service. I suspect that's first line support assumptions in some cases.  The best luck I had in both speaking with someone, understanding the ToS, good shared QoS (1and1 servers are heavily taxed)... I ended up choosing Network Solutions. This is not meant to be an advertisement - just explaining my (re)action to the news while I try to run a non-profit group. I feel for Max and would encourage him to check them out.  Yes it's more expensive but in the end, they have been around for 30 years and seem to be more tolerant of this stuff.  With all the laws changing or being created, I think our days are numbered anyhow.

It may be that ethicalhacker.net is hosted on 1&1 but the very fact that they have the capacity to do what they did to Max, it's like a ticking time bomb and a risk I'm not willing to take for my site. 

I run an ethical hacking website who is hosted with 1&1.  Since one of my members pointed out what happened with intern0t, I could not imagine just losing everything - not just the website but resources tied to it.  So I called 1and1 and asked them to review my site so that I can at least have some opportunity to discuss the issue.  I called the general help desk who in turn gave me a separate number to their security department. There was no waiting and reached a direct person.  While he seemed on the ball he couldn't answer my question and said he would have someone look at my website.  I asked 5 times for someone to call me back to discuss and not to email.  Well they emailed me.  Their email to me is as follows.  For the record, I HATE 1and1 for the last 3 years and I am in the process of moving to another host.

--------------------------
Subject: C253550640  - 1&1 Internet Compliance

Dear ------ ------, (Customer ID: xxxxxxxxx)

Hi, you called asking if group51.org violates any terms and condtions.  As long
as a customer site does not violate our terms and conditions regarding adult
content, the abuse department does not care what the content of the site is.
Even if it is a hacker forum, it's not going to matter to us, as long as you are
not hacking with our equipment.  You can say what you want, publish what you
want, and do what you will with your own computer, but you may not use any of
our equipment for hacking.  If we discover you doing this, it can lead to the
locking and/or termination of your account.

--
Sincerely,
Security Team
1&1 Internet, Inc.

This CTF is not like most.  It takes on a multi "episode" approach.  Over the life time of the CTF, players will be divided in the categories listed above.  It will be the job of CTU to find out who the terrorists are.  It will be the job of the terrorists to fullfill the master terrorist plot.  Each episode victory will reveal a secret piece of the final master plan that will be fed to the winning party.   There is an IRC chat server inside the darknet to communicate with ALL players to social engineer, to meet secretly, and to spy.  There are various honey pots setup.  There are many "infrastructure" targets to protect and attack.  Points will be awarded throughout the challenge and listed here.  The description of the points will not be listed until the end of the challenge

http://group51.org
Scenario: http://group51.org/images/ctu.mp3

What: Get a personal virtual machine within an isolated network. (playground).  Get it ready to attack other machines and to be attacked.  Last machine running is the winner.  Full rules in progress based on the number of participants.  Hack, crack, sniff, phish, social engineer... do what it takes to win. (all activity occurs within an isolated encrypted network connect via VPN)

Where: http://group51.org

Why: Practice ehacking skills in an active, isolated, encrypted network with a bunch of other people. 

Who: Anyone with any skill level.  The objective is to learn something new.

When: Your machine must be built and ready to be the attacker and attackee by Sept 25th.

How: Register on the site.

Thanks Sync.

I am the site founder.   I would like to add what makes our group a little unique is that we focus on providing physical resources to actually use the tools we learn about.  Members are given VPN access to our "Playground" where there's a number of servers, services and devices that help people learn while obeying the law.   All hacking is executed in this isolated LAN. 

Eventually, we would like members to setup and build their own nodes to form a clustered network, expanding the size of our playground while making it more fault tolerant.

While we are far from experts, we enjoy this topic and excited to learn new things. 

To the authors of EH-Net, kudos to you all.  I hope our project at Group51.org is 1/10000000th as successful as your site.   Keep up the good work.