I just received this email from Hostgator: It appears that you are building an MP3 sharing site at zakafrance.com. I > wanted to warn you before you go any further that these types of sites are > not permitted and if you are found in possession of copy righted material > your account may be suspended with no backup provided. >> Thank You, I replied stating that it is merely a search engine site, searching esnips.com and the users download from esnips not zakafrance.com and that no material is hosted at hostgator. esnips appears to be a legal site. No reply has been received. anyone here had any experience or can throw any light on this as I don't want my account suspended. thanks.
Lame. You had a shared account I bet? They wouldn't pull this sort of shenanigans for a dedicated customer.
HostGator is pretty weird lately. I have bought shared hosting and prepaid 6 months with them. Then I contacted their live support and asked if I can host an image hosting site (their TOS dont allow it), but I said that I have done all the required measures to disable hotlinking. The representative said that it was all right then. A few days later I was suspended, after a few emails I've received a full refund, though. Now I moved to DreamHost (use the link in my sig for $50 off) and I have no problems yet... I have also contacted DreamHost support and asked if those image hosting sites are allowed, and they said it is fine, so good so far.
Well I can shed some light as far as copyright issues go. Under copyright regulations your site would definitely be viewed as infringing copyright. Linking to/or enabling someone to illegally download copyrighted material is viewed as contributory infringement. It doesn't matter that you aren't hosting any of the MP3's it would still be infringement of copyright. The "it's only a search engine" defense won't work since the sole purpose of the site is to find MP3's.