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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.
Gee, who woulda guessed? Are Polish jokes still in vogue?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
nearlyfreespeech.net
Well, since you are Polish and making fun of President Putin, you might want to consider that you have more to worry about than the ISP taking you down.
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.
Based on this
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.
I recommend a good lawyer.
See Beck v. Eiland-Hall as to why.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
rent a cheap vps off a sketchy dealer that takes btc, job done.
dreamhost just renames the vhost dir for DMCA's and emails you after the fact
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.
Make sure to check out xmission.com . They are US based, but they have a great track record of supporting free speech and customer privacy. If they're willing to host maddox and his "best page in the universe" I'm sure that they can handle a parody site that might not be popular with the parodied person/company.
Here is their transparency page: http://xmission.com/transparen...
Outstanding! "We refer you to figure A". Yeah.
Also I liked the "PDF Warning". So 2001sh...
Fox?
What are your bandwidth and storage requirements? What platform are you looking to build on? Shoot me an email with some details, I might be able to help you out on this one.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
IIRC, AWS ditched wikileaks.org like a hot potatoe after a simple phone call by some US official. Of all the services suggested here, AWS would probably be the last service one should look at for this purpose.
[Ducking and running]
Have gnu, will travel.
A host not caring is the worst thing possible in this situation.
Not caring makes it easy to just delete the site instead of bothering with paper work and lawyers.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
But what if the atmosphere here on Earth were to suddenly level out at 21%?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
I'm crazy curious about WTF is in Poland that anyone in the US would even recognize enough to be worth parodying.
All I can come up with is CDProjekt, but I've never heard of them being "Heavy-handed" like TFS mentions..
last I checked parody != harassment. I know some celebrities and politicians would LOVE for that to be true, but so far, its not
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I can provide hosting. I am not a big host like some others, but am located in USA and I do not cave to threats.
The last guy, Robert Smolely, who threatened me with a libel claim for posting my lawsuit accusing him of illegal spamming spent 40 months in prison. I had an ex employer threaten me with a libel claim which when we went to court, they wrote me a 6 figure check.
Contact me through my web site.
Fight Spammers!
I recommend https://www.syseleven.de/ for a number of reasons:
* Technically highly sophisticated staff whose motto is "Hosting done right"
* Located in Germany (Berlin) with laws applicable in the EU
* Motivated staff in terms of looking at content from a data protection POV
* Staff is known not to budge from unsubstantiated threats
* They will tell you whether your content is legally acceptable
Won't get any better than that.
From the story about "Ralph Lauren Opens a Store in the Uncanny Valley":
However, Ralph Lauren's marketing arm and its law firm don't see it that way. According to them, this is an "infringing image," and they thoughtfully took the time to send a DMCA takedown notice to our awesome ISP, Canada's Priority Colo. One of the things that makes Priority Colo so awesome is that they don't automatically act on DMCA takedowns. Instead, they pass them on to us and we talk about whether they pass the giggle-test.
This one doesn't.
I wonder if NearlyFreeSpeech had the old saying, "The sun never sets on the British empire," in mind when creating figure A?
Unfortunately an awful lot of so-called "parody" posts and sites are just people being mean-spirited and cruel and using the age old bully's line when called on it -- "Can't you take a joke?"
So before you go hunting for an ISP, do a little soul searching and above all else, ask yourself if anyone but you is going to find it funny.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Works both ways. Not caring means they probably won't do anything to the site unless it's actually breaking some law that could get AWS in hot water. A parody site sounds like it would be legal if a bit controversial. The poster before you mentioned Wi\kileaks getting the boot from AWS, well, Wikileaks is definitely engaged in illegal activity, so can't really say there's much surprise there.
I like AWS, I think they provide a good service and again, unless it's outright illegal, I doubt they'll do anything to your site regardless of what you put there.
OP wanted suggestions. This is mine. ^.^
Doesn't surprise me at all, and hardly seems a fair criticism. I would expect most hosting services would prohibit sites that are likely to cause disproportionate load, unless they have a charging model that allows for it.
That is priceless!!! I now know who I will use if I ever go back into web design contracting.
The mention of RPGs had me thinking Palladium Books (Rifts) or Games Workshop, but they're in Michigan and the UK, respectively. That's probably just a red herring, though.
Host it in Freenet (at least a mirror), that way it can never be taken down by ANYONE :)
Some reasons for RPGs and MUDs being banned are that traditional MUDs are server systems rather than web apps, RPGs for the web tend to be heavy applications, they tend to be heavily trafficked, they tend to be poorly written and become security issues, the gamers tend to complain to the hosting company when things go wrong, they tend to get very spammy in their chat systems, and they tend to turn into command and control systems for malware if the people running them aren't careful and skilled. If you want to do something like an RPG, a dedicated server is really more appropriate than shared hosting.
As for parody, any decent US ISP understands the DMCA and copyright law. The DMCA forces them to forward the complaint and to take things down after a certain amount of time if there's no response. Parody protects you in the courts. The DMCA makes pre-court demands of the hosting provider. They can lose their immunity from copyright suits if they don't cooperate lawfully. Just be prepared to challenge takedown notices.
Other than a conforming DMCA takedown notice, any decent hosting provider shouldn't care as long as you're not a DDoS target and the content is lawful.
You seem to be more concerned about defamation than DMCA. HostGator for one won't do anything about defamation claims until there's a court order. They'll shut your account down if you are a frequently repeated DDoS target on a shared server, though. They'll do what the law says they have to do when the DMCA is involved, though.
Seriously, why not do it yourself? You can get a pretty cheap virtual host from any number of providers and just do it. You don't even have to manage the entire server, plenty of virtual hosting services too... but personally I'd recommend doing the entire server. My Linode is cheap as hell and provides a great place to host my mail and web host, as well as providing a hub for my VPN network. Yes, I have to manage it as well, but apart from the occasion patches I don't really do much with it once it was all set up except use it.
https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/create
Casteism