Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Where Are the Complete Hosting Providers?
Kludge writes "In 2000 there were thousands of email/web hosting businesses. In 2013 not much has changed. To get my email/web/webmail/domain/VOIP/public-key/XMPP/VPN hosting I have to deal with five different service providers. Where are the complete hosting providers? The absence of competition in this area drives many to Google, making data siphoning easy for the NSA. Why has hosting not advanced in the last 10 years? Where are the hosting providers that make end-to-end encrypted email/web/VOIP/XMPP easy and automatic for all my clients?"
The submitter implied Google was not suitable with the remark "making data siphoning easy for the NSA".
How is FireHost significantly less vulnerable to the NSA when "The Letter" arrives? From what I see FireHost has significant infrastructure in USA, a CEO with US ties, many employees living in the USA.
If the NSA is not a worry to the asker, then there are many solutions, FireHost possibly being one of them. If the NSA is an issue then it becomes trickier...
What actually is a complete hosting provider?
I don't get the question in the summary. It sounds like the guy is asking for a host he can pay that will automatically set up some arbitrary services that he's decided constitute "complete hosting"?
I don't really see how an ISP can cater to such an arbitrary definition when there's literally millions of different services an ISP could be expected to provide.
Isn't the solution just to get your own VPS or dedicated server and just install everything you want on it or am I missing something here?
Is there some defintion of "Complete Hosting Provider" whereby said provider to conform must provide the services the summary is asking for even though it's a rather obscure combination of things to provide on one host?
From what I can fathom the answer to the question is: "You are not the only person on the internet, different people have different use cases, no ISP could possibly cater to ever combination people may want, nor would they probably want to because it would require having experts in each of those millions of technologies to manage them all hence why they stick to their areas of expertise or provide you a blank server you can install whatever the hell you want to on". Unless there is some definition of "Complete Hosting" that encompasses only a fringe handful of available services then I can't see this changing.
You don't need to stop them, you just need to make their life too difficult for it to be worth chasing you when you've got nothing worth chasing for.
The more people that do this the more it eats into NSA resources, if you force a real person into the loop to decide if you're worth chasing then you really cause a massively disproportionate impact on the NSA's resources compared to if you just let them farm your data automatically from unencrypted services they have a tap on like Google.
Then eventually when things like the Boston bombings keep happening despite the NSA has a mass of financing from the US government behind it and taps on most the world someone in congress is finally going to have to ask "What the fuck is the point in all this expenditure?" and the plug is going to get pulled.
If the NSA ends up chasing, expensively, because of the cost of intervention of human resources, people who are entirely irrelevant and innocent of everything, then eventually they're going to have to change tact. Eventually they're going to have to realise that universal snooping is ineffective and just makes it even harder to tell who really is and isn't a threat. They'll have to go back to what they should be doing in the first place - focusing on the hard work of identifying real actual threats rather than hoping a mass computer network will somehow figure that out for them, something the Boston case showed it absolutely can't.
As the owner of a hosting company, that's the same impression that i got. He's asking for a grouping of products that don't naturally group together. When people think of hosting, they think of web, mail, and dns. They generally don't think of VoIP, VPN, or XMPP, or whatever the submitter expects to receive when he asks for "public key" service. It's nonsense.
Squash