AL MANAMAH, BAHRAIN – According to the vice-president of The World Khan Do Kwan Federation (WKDKF), his organization recently received a harsh lesson in the perils of “outsourcing,” and the importance of choosing web service providers carefully.Last month, the WKDKF discovered that its website included unauthorized links to porn sites. It took reports in the press and threats of a lawsuit just to get a response out of their site host, who had changed server access codes for the WKDKF website without notification and without providing new passwords, leaving WKDKF officials helpless and unable to remove the problem links.
Ashraf Ali Ghansar, vice-president of the WKDKF, told Bahrain’s Gulf Daily News (GDN) that his company had decided not to file a lawsuit against the hosting company, which is based in Kerala, India with satellite offices in Bahrain and Saudia Arabia, now that the links have been removed and the hosting company had agreed to turn the site over to a new host.
“Prior to the publishing of the story in the GDN, I had a hard time trying to get hold of the company to remove those links,” said Ghansar. “It took a police report and a story in the press to get their attention.”
The hosting company held the contract for multiple other “official” martial arts websites in addition to the WKDKF site, including the website of WKDKF founder Javed Khan, the Grand Master Khan’s Fighting Arts Academy (MKFAA) and the U.S.-based International Progressive Taekwondo Federation.
Ghansar said his federation had trouble with the host from the very start of its contract, which began in June of 2005.
“We could only update the websites two to three times because the company kept changing the access codes,” Ghansar told the GDN. “Whenever we requested the new passwords, we were always supplied with the wrong ones.”
Ghansar said that when the WKDKF told the company the federation was unsatisfied with the service and wanted to change to another service provider “we did not get any reply.”
“Instead,” Ghansar said, “when we checked our websites we found that one was linked to this site advertising porn.”
The hosting company, not identified by name in the GDN reports, claimed that the website in question had been “manipulated” by hackers.
After Ghansar and the WKDKF threatened to sue, however, the host agreed to yield control of the domain to another service.
Ghansar said the WKDKF ended up having to pay the hosting company in question a fee, “but that’s a small price to pay to get the filth out of the website.”
The WKDKF will never again use the hosting company’s services, Ghansar said, calling the experience “a lesson we will never forget.”
