Bulletproof hosting (sometimes known as bulk-friendly hosting) is a service provided by some domain hosting or web hosting firms that allows their customer considerable leniency in the kinds of material they may upload and distribute. This leniency has been taken advantage of by spammers and providers of online gambling or illegal pornography.
Many service providers have Terms of Service that do not allow certain materials to be uploaded or distributed, or the service to be used in a particular way, and may suspend a hosting account, after a few complaints, to minimize the risk of their IP subnet being blocked by anti-spam filters using Internet Protocol (IP) address-based filtering. Additionally, some service providers may have ethical concerns that underpin their service terms and conditions.
Often, a bulletproof host allows a content provider to bypass the laws or contractual terms of service regulating Internet content and service use in its own country of operation, as many of these 'bulletproof hosts' are based 'overseas' (relative to the geographical location of the content provider).
Many if not most 'bulletproof hosts' are in China, other parts of Asia, and Russia/Russia's surrounding countries, though this is not always the case. For example, McColo, responsible for 2/3rds of the world's spam when taken down, was US based.
Bulletproof hosting providers have a high rate of turnover, as many hosting providers choose to shut down, whether forcibly or voluntarily, if their alternative would be to compromise client freedom (as this is their main selling point). The following are some notable examples of bulletproof hosts, with their takedown time: