Sloppy Police Work Meets Blind Compliance: The Pixhost.to Domain Suspension
Pixhost.to, now also available at pixhost.cc and pixho.st, is an image-hosting service for user-uploaded content. Over its nearly 20-year history, more than 750 million images have been uploaded, the vast majority of which remain available online today. We operate automated and manual abuse-detection and complaint-handling systems designed to identify and remove the small fraction of uploads that violate our rules. Abusive material represents only a tiny proportion of overall uploads.
Nevertheless, the pixhost.to domain was suspended from July 22 to July 29 by inaming.co, the company responsible for the operational management of the .to registry. We received no warning and were given no opportunity to respond before the suspension. What followed was a week of avoidable disruption, procedural failures and increasingly bizarre events. This is what happened.
On July 22, we discovered that pixhost.to had stopped resolving. We soon confirmed that the domain had been placed under serverHold, a registry status that prevents it from resolving. We immediately contacted inaming and asked why the domain had been suspended.
Inaming forwarded us a notice from the Indian police requesting registration and account information for pixhost.to — information that inaming itself said it did not hold — and instructing that the entire domain be suspended. The notice did not identify any allegedly unlawful image, specific Pixhost URL, filename or other information that would allow us to locate the content. Inaming nevertheless said that the domain would remain suspended until the police explicitly authorized its restoration.
We promptly reviewed the notice, asked inaming to lift the suspension and offered our full cooperation with the investigation. We pointed out that the notice identified no allegedly abusive content on Pixhost and that the cited legal provisions appeared to be mechanisms for obtaining information and evidence, not authority for ordering the suspension of an entire domain.
Inaming’s response was blunt: “No. We are required to abide by law enforcement. Sorry.”
On a more positive note, inaming connected us by email with the police officer handling the case. We contacted him immediately, again offered full cooperation and explained that we were ready to remove any identified content and provide the relevant upload records. At that point, we expected the matter to be resolved within hours.
After receiving no response, we contacted an Indian lawyer based in Gurugram, near the cybercrime unit handling the investigation, on the morning of July 23. Because of slow initial communication and the intervening weekend, the lawyer did not begin actively working on the case until July 27.
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Over the next two days, our lawyer communicated with the investigating officer. It gradually became apparent that:
- The police could not provide a single Pixhost URL for the material under investigation because they had not preserved or recorded one.
- The case concerned several intimate images of an Indian woman that had leaked online and spread across numerous websites.
- According to our lawyer, substantially the same notice had been sent to the registries responsible for numerous other domains on which the material had appeared. Inaming appeared to be the only operator that responded by disabling an entire domain; the other services apparently handled the matter as a content-removal request and remained online.
We were stuck in an absurd loop: inaming would not restore the domain without police approval, while the police could not even identify the content at issue.
On July 29, our lawyer made a much more serious allegation. He told us that the investigating officer was seeking an unofficial payment of INR 300,000 (approximately $3,150) to resolve the matter. We did not receive this demand directly from the officer and cannot independently verify the allegation. The lawyer then suggested that INR 150,000 might be a more “reasonable” amount. We categorically refused to authorize or reimburse any unofficial payment and began considering other lawful options.
Then, almost a week after our first email, the police suddenly replied.
The reply confirmed the central problem: the police still could not provide a URL identifying content hosted on Pixhost. The two links led to third-party forum pages. Using material preserved in Google’s cache, we were able to retrieve images from other hosts and build a script to search for visual matches among images uploaded to Pixhost. After many hours and tens of millions of comparisons, the script found a match. Further analysis identified two Pixhost uploads in total. We removed both images and provided the police with the available upload records.
Within hours, the police sent inaming a notice asking for the suspension to be lifted, and pixhost.to began resolving again.
We are relieved that pixhost.to was restored, but this should never have required a week of downtime, local legal assistance and a custom search across tens of millions of images. A police notice that identified no Pixhost URL and cited no clear authority for a whole-domain suspension was accepted without meaningful scrutiny. Inaming disabled the entire domain without prior notice, declined to conduct an independent review and kept it offline until the same police officer withdrew the request. In our view, this demonstrates seriously inadequate compliance, escalation and due-process procedures. As a result, we can no longer regard .to domains as dependable for critical services and recommend using alternative domains.
