Lessons We've Learned After 17 Years of American Hosting
The USA is no longer an ally; sometimes it seems or acts more like a foe
A week ago: The Reach of Techrights Has Broadened
Two years ago the sister site and this site left America. All the attacks on us always came from Americans. Always. But there are prior things worthy of a mention:
- Back in 2008, due to DDoS attacks on our site, the American webhost that was our original webhost pulled the plug; yes, instead of doing its work - which ought to involve DDoS mitigation - the webhost considered us 'expensive'; so we moved to Tracy's servers. A responsible webhost would not treat sites like this, not for being the victims (of DDoS attacks). Tracy, unlike that webhost, always fought back against DDoS attacks, whenever they happened (he tried Varnish, various blacklists, and so on).
- There's no such thing as free hosting (not the same as cheap hosting). We always paid Tracy for his work, even if not much (given how much effort he had put in). They say there's "no free lunch". That applies to everything, even social control media such as Mastodon instances. If you don't get charged for it, then somebody is taking advantage of what you do (e.g. telling you what you can and cannot say).
- USA is against free speech. It's actively hostile towards it, even before the rifles and death threats "come out". Do not be easily fooled by fancy political branding and slogans, which boil down to hegemonistic propaganda or visions of a distant past (independence from The Crown) with the aim to influence the future.
- Whether you live in America or not (mostly but not only USA), considering leaving US hosting. That applies to GAFAM, too. It'll only get worse, not better. Don't wait until it's too late. Don't be optimistic and assume the best-case scenarioas. The current trajectory is self-explanatory and it predates the latest political assassination.
If there is a fading hegemonistic world (moving towards a rising multipolarity), consider which "pole" is controlling you. It's not good to choose Russian or Chinese hosting (suffice to say!); there are other options out there.
But the most important point is, do not choose "free hosting"; no such thing exists; if Debian gets 'free' servers from Google (GAFAM), it is not free. Debian is then expected (tacitly so) to do something in return, e.g. censorship of GAFAM critics in mailing lists, adoption of malicious Codes of Censorship, data-sharing (to NSA et al via GAFAM). Daniel Pocock wrote a lot about it and showed suppressed evidence of it. This issue isn't limited to USA, but GAFAM is "all-in" with the "Trump agenda". So you can generally tell things will get worse before they get any better. █