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Ask Slashdot: Good Hosting Service For a Parody Site?
An anonymous reader writes "Ok, bear with me now. I know this is not PC Mag 2014 review of hosting services. I am thinking of getting a parody website up. I am mildly concerned about potential reaction of the parodee, who has been known to be a little heavy handed when it comes to things like that. In short, I want to make sure that the hosting company won't flake out just because of potential complaints. I checked some companies and their TOS and AUPs all seem to have weird-ass restrictions (Arvixe, for example, has a list of unacceptable material that happens to list RPGs and MUDS ). I live in U.S.; parodee in Poland. What would you recommend?"
I run a small ISP. I can host it for you. Let me know how much bandwidth you expect to pull and we can work something out. brock at the domain blackmesawireless daht net.
nearlyfreespeech.net
https://www.bahnhof.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnhof
Swedish hoster. They have a credible commitment to freedom of speech. They have secretly recorded and leaked conversations with the SIGINT pressuring them to share data. They have provided hosting for WikiLeaks in the past. Also, they have been hosting a controversial Swedish serivce named Lexbase, essentially publishing the names of all persons occurring in Swedish court documents. They refused to shut it down for several days, until it was hacked and shut down due to security issues.
nearlyfreespeech.net.
They actually fight back against takedown notices. They know they're a US site and give 0 fucks what foreign governments think of your content. They have a sense of humor (anyone have the link to their response letter about badgers?). Seems perfect for you.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Ah, here it is (PDF warning). It was linked from that blog post. Teach me to post before coffee!
On the general subject of badgers, we definitely do see cause for concern. It is at this point well-known among frequent Internet users -- including us -- that the rapid
proliferation of "badger, badger, badger" leads -- inevitably -- to mushrooms and, if left unchecked, a very frightening snake, in a vicious cycle with no apparent end. That
definitely seems like a concern worthy of the attention of a large UK government agency like DEFRA. We have and offer no official position on the proposed DEFRA response to the badger menace that you outline in your letter.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
https://1984hosting.com/ - they have defended their customers freedom of speech all the way up to the highest court in Iceland numerous times.
SomethingAwful is over at Steadfast.net, who has a rather first-amendment heavy interpretation of most laws. I know first-hand how their abuse desk works, and they'll allow practically anything that's not explicitly illegal.
Any organization attacking your published site will send DMCA emails to the hosting / bandwidth provider, but will also attack the DNS registrar for copyright violation. That's going to be the more difficult one to choose because there are a finite number of registrars and they all want to cover-their-ass against ICAAN violations.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
What you are looking for is a technical solution for a social problem.
First you must look at what they will most likely try to charge you with. Is it copyright related or rather defamation. Second is to look who they are related to and estimate how far they are willing to go.
You can look worldwide, not only in the US. Look where Torrent sites are hosted. That would be a good start. Also look where similar sites are hosted.
And be prepared that things will go down at one point, so have a backup plan available. e.g. a running mirror that is not visible, but will be the moment your main site goes down. You can even have a 'site went down because of ...' prepared already to handle the Streisant effect.
I would look also carefully into the TLD you are going to pick. com, net and org might seem fine, but might also be easy to delete.
Last but not least, look if it is realy worth the trouble. Will they make life hard for people you have contact with in Poland? Also: Don't be disapointed if nobade cares.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The host is important and has been covered extensively, but you should also put your site behind CloudFlare. They'll protect against DDOS attacks, and it makes it harder for the parodied party to determine who the host even is if the entire site is behind CloudFlare. They have a long history of not taking things down just because somebody finds it objectionable. And, you get free SSL with CloudFlare too.