I happened to stumble upon this site the other day and at first glance the home page looked to me a lot lot lot lot like our home page. The images are different, the icons (which we had custom designed) are slightly altered but the overall essence of the page to me looks quite similar. Take a look at the two home pages and let me know what you think. (probably not a coincidence they actually list Hivelocity on their site and explain all the reasons they are better).
Well it’s clearly a rip in the sense that they’ve definitely copied the layout of your website.
Menu > Banner > Serving clients > Some text > Picture with a guy standing in front of some servers > Icons > Popular configs > Stats > Reviews > Footer
That is most definitely not a coincidence.
But it’s not a rip in the sense that the design itself is different… so unless you own the copyrights to arranging elements on a website in a certain order, I doubt you’d have a case.
Without a doubt, they based their design on your website. But you can’t really do anything about it.
The homepage alone haves enough of similarities.
The section below the hero image, the featured plans (popular configuration^) and the network indicators. Same thing with really slight differences.
Edit: Just take it with a smile, it only means that competitors are looking up to you. So kudos.
It’s more than likely they hired the same guys you did or they gave a designer a list of websites, yours included. Web design especially for hosts is all the same nowadays, just a rotation of design elements.
I didnt read what you wrote beside the title and opening the links. As in one of the comments 404error mentions “But you can’t really do anything about it”, I assumed that you had intentions of doing so. And the only thing that came to my mind was a sue due to copyright infringement.
Talking as a designer myself, their design is definitely a 90% copy of your design. They probably hired a designer and said “we love hivelocity’s design, we want the same”. If the designer had some sense, he/she tried to make something unique enough, but the owners kept asking for more changes until they were happy with the design ( == it looks just like hivelocity).
The other scenario is the designer just copied your style, and gave it as a unique design. The owners, not having memorized what every other website looks like, accepted the design, not knowing it was a blatant copy.
Unfortunately even if they deliberately copied it, they will still claim they had no idea it was a copy, and blame the designer for the second scenario.
As for any copyright claim, as long as they have designed and coded it themselves, even if it looks just like yours, it’s not a “rip” in a sense that they stole your code. Since you don’t plan to sue them or anything, it doesn’t matter.
In short, if hivelocity’s website didn’t exist, serverroom’s website would look different. That makes it a stolen design in an ethical sense, if not in a legal sense.
Most irritating thing about these cunts is the “free” server they offer for the first year…
Free after $79 setup fee which effectively makes it about $7/mo. Who the hell would go with that option and be stuck with these fools for a whole year instead of just getting the exact same server from them for $7/mo? Shitty marketing tactics.
