Who is HostItCheap.com?

And how are they coming up as a referrer?

[eugenebarnes]

Nearly every month I see www.HostItCheap.com in my client's logs as a referrer... yet none of my clients have a link from their site.

I assume they are using some sort of trick to get my attention and business. They certainly won't get my business. But how are they doing that?

[hasbeen]

I saw some talk about this on a web hosting board. It's more or less log spamming. From what I understand, the host is actually denying they are resonsible and blaming it on anyone from their customers running search scripts to dial up users. Their solution is to simply exclude it in your robots.txt file.

My guess is that they either have their own bot doing it or are paying someone to do it for them. Apparently (although I've not noticed it), this is a new form of viral marketing some companies are resorting to.

[dmorison]

There are a number of web hosting companies that are logfile spamming by creating requests that look like someone has looked up your domain name on their "handy whois form".

For example, a referrer of:

http://www.spamminghostingcompany.com/whois.asp?domain=yourdomain.com

is almost certainly logfile spamming. Not easy to detect if you just own the one domain; but when you own nearly 50 and see the exact same referrer to all your domains within a relatively short period it stands out a mile.

Just add them to your mental list of companies to never do business with.

adds: the DMOZ data dump seems to be a common source of domains to go logfile spamming on...