Domain registrar and Web hosting provider Go Daddy shut down a website that enables visitors to rate and comment on their community's police officers.

Go Daddy decided to take down RateMyCop.com (ratemycop.com) after it received complaints from police departments, who became apprehensive about the site in January when the Culver City, California startup began issuing public information requests for lists of uniformed officers.

Visitors to the site were redirected to a Go Daddy page that read, "Oops!!!", and requested the site owner to contact the Web host to find out the reason as to why the site being taken down.

Gino Sesto, founder of the Culver City, California startup, told Wired that Go Daddy did not notify him about the suspension. When he contacted Go Daddy, the Web host informed him that they had pulled the plug on the site for "suspicious activity."

When he finally spoke to a supervisor, Sesto says Go Daddy changed its story and said the site had exceeded its 3TB bandwidth limit. He says the claim is ridiculous, adding that the site could not have possibly surpassed its bandwidth limit with only 80,000 page views on Tuesday and 400,000 on Monday.

The site, which went live on February 28, stores the names and, in some cases, badge numbers of over 140,000 cops in up to 500 police departments. The police have complained that the security of undercover cops is at risk if their names are posted online.

However, Sesto says this concern is unfounded considering that undercover police officers are not included in the database, and the site does not post any personal information such as home addresses. Chief Jerry Dyer, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, says he wants to get legislation passed that would make RateMyCop.com illegal.

Go Daddy has had a reputation of censoring its customers. In January 2007, the company took down an entire security website, delisting it from DNS, to take off a single, archived mailing list post.

A Go Daddy spokeswoman said it could not yet comment on the RateMyCop case because of its privacy policy. Meanwhile, Sesto says he has already found a new Web host and hopes to have the site online Tuesday night.

A visit to the RateMyCop.com Wednesday morning revealed that the site appears to be back online.