
Ask HN: Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? - needahost
I'm posting under a different name for various reasons but I'm a regular contributor here.<p>So, my host is a pussy. I have a site doing a good amount of traffic - 2mm uniques, 8mm pages/month, heavy data and growing - but we're having some legal issues right now. I can't really get into it but suffice it to say we're being bullied by a major public company and our host is flipping out. No, we're most certainly not doing anything illegal and no, this doesn't involve the music/entertainment industry. ;)<p>So we need a new host - right away. Ideally, I think we might be looking to go offshore because that will at least give our oppressor(s) one less avenue through which they can attack us. At the same time, this is scary to me. We do a lot of data and we can't afford to be slowed down or, god forbid, drop offline for any period of time.<p>So my question is - does anyone have any recommendations for a stellar offshore host or even a local host with some marbles that won't retract into their stomachs every time they get a frivolous BS C&#38;D? The Planet seems to be the go-to option here in the US. Any others?
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needahost
You guys rock. I'm checking out nearlyfree right now but I think PRQ might be
the way to go. Moving our site over is going to be painful and expensive so we
want to get it right the first time and not have to deal with it again. With
PRQ, it looks like we can do just that.

The best part about all this - the company who is bullying us has never, not
ONCE, sent a notice directly to us. Nope, they just pelt our host as a scare
tactic. Low and behold, it finally worked and our host gave us a week to
vacate. Super, thanks...

So as usual, you guys rock. Thanks so much for the help. Sweden here we come -
where the air is cold, the women are blond and the hosts have brass balls.

~~~
ajkirwin
I run a.. shall we say, niche site. 9 million hits a month, about 2TB of
data.. and we use Hetzner. They're pretty good.

<http://www.hetzner.de/>

~~~
kirubakaran
2TB... hmmm... no guessing needed :-D

~~~
ajkirwin
Would guessing still be needed if I said it was a non-subscription website? :P

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mixmax
Try and look into where the pirate bay is hosted. They seem to have balls of
steel.

~~~
jotto
"PRQ has gone out of its way to host sites that other companies would not
touch. It is perhaps the worlds least lawyer-friendly hosting company" - NYT

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRQ>

~~~
ii
Thanks for info.

I have some adult art drawn by myself that just sit there; there should be a
way to share it with a real world... I've never even thought about do it with
normal hosting company or, "God have mercy", do it on my own servers...

We have dark sides -- we need dark sites. Long Live PRQ!

Edit: please comment if you downmod it, I really want to know what do you
think about it.

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cstejerean
Can you at least name the company that's bullying you so we can go out of our
way not to do business with them?

~~~
needahost
Believe me I would love to but for the time being we've been advised not to.

~~~
marvin
Make sure you tell us about your company when this blows over, I love
businesses that insult powerful people ;)

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Harkins
I've heard NearlyFreeSpeech.net is good. No colo or dedicated, tho.

~~~
kirubakaran
Yup. More details here: <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse>

~~~
netcan
"When our members upload content to our service, they are asserting two
things:

    
    
        * That the content is legal in the United States.
    
        * That they have the legal right to make the content available."

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palish
<http://www.reflected.net>

They're very good. I have a dedicated server with them. They also host
www.ytmnd.com, which has had a long history of copyright trouble.

~~~
mrkurt
Their parent company (Server Central) might be good to talk to as well, if you
want something other than dedicated servers (colo and whatnot).

~~~
palish
Thanks!

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callmeed
I asked about Euro-based hosts here recently:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295949>

That might help

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natch
Host offshore, but put heavy assets on AWS S3? I don't have an answer on the
host, but thought this idea might help, since offshore hosts can be slower for
US access. Amazon might be pussies too, I don't know; but this might buy you
time.

~~~
andr
They shut down Muxtape.

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martey
Muxtape was not hosted offshore, and it dealt with music. I am not sure its
situation has any bearing on that of the original poster.

~~~
natch
I would think it would have a bearing. Wimps are wimps. I retract my AWS S3
suggestion.

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lsc
redundancy is key

keep complete copies in different hosting companies on different continents.

For details beyond that, we'd need to know what kind of trouble. The US is
pretty good for most kinds of political speech, but horrible for many kinds of
commercial speech. Many other countries are the opposite.

But yeah. if you make sure you have a hot spare of your complete system in
more than one country (this should be pretty cheap with the proliferation of
VPS providers) you will be in much better shape. Once you have that covered,
you really only need to worry about your DNS provider.

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pasbesoin
Thanks for this thread. I've been becoming increasingly concerned about both
stability and liability in the face of today's legal climate. Even the little
discussion community that I've managed on my own nickel I see increasingly as
a potential liability. One nut whose posts get some official or professional
attention, and my life might be made cr*p. Although I wasn't actively
researching, this gives me some options to consider.

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lacky
SoftLayer is an amazing US host. They have a quality service, the support is
great, and the price isn't bad, although they do have their 'premium'. I can't
vouch for how they'd act with legal matters, but I'm sure the sales reps can
give you a good idea.

Don't go with PRQ. I've had a server with them before, and their support is
nonexistant, and the speeds are nothing amazing. We've once waiting 3 months
for a RAM upgrade.

Leaseweb is good if you need a cheap, decent server. They stand up for their
clients in legal matters, and the speeds are pretty good.

I've had dedicated servers with all of these hosts, and all my reviews are
based on first hand experience.

~~~
needahost
Thanks for the info lacky. The comments about support and speed are pretty
alarming. LeaseWeb might be worth looking into but cost isn't really a concern
right now. We need premium (fast) service and a host who isn't afraid of the
possibility of a frivolous suit (especially since we pay any and all legal
fees!).

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jbert
Would it be possible to create a web hosting system which doesn't have a
single point of "legal failure"?

I guess by definition, it couldn't be run as one company. But you could have
independent but co-operating companies in multiple countries, each holding a
copy of the hosted data.

Would the directors/shareholders/managers have to be different personnel?
(e.g. if Alice receives a cease-and-desist for material hosted by company A1
in country C1, is Alice under any obligation if she also works for company A2
in country C2 which also holds the material (and is available under the same
URL, so would probably come under the same letter)?

Some sort of a redundant array of inexpensive countries would be needed to
have an 'internet state' that wasn't beholden to the laws of any individual
country.

~~~
mseebach
I think the model would have to be to develop an open source kit that allows
standardized pluggable distributed hosting in "a box".

I wouldn't expect a significant market for simple non-dynamic hosting - the
solution would have to accomodate blogs, forums and other dynamic content-
apps.

Any provider of such hosting would just be provided with a config-file, and
then start to pull the content, sync the DB etc. The kit should be designed to
expect nodes to drop of randomly, and be self-healing (i.e. "elect" a new
master-node, or be purely peer-to-peer).

Maybe the kit could be modelled on top of Google App Engine.

One single-point-of-failure would be DNS though. If your domain is .com, and
Verisign pulls it, you could be hosted on the moon, and still disappear.

~~~
jbert
> If your domain is .com, and Verisign pulls it, you could be hosted on the
> moon, and still disappear.

Ouch. I forgot about that. I guess one approach would be to have the same name
under several registries, trying to get decent coverage across juridictions
where the physical nameservers are located.

You could encourage people to choose a random (supported) top-level part
(.com, .fr, .se, .co.uk, etc) in links, so a single DNS takedown would only
hit a portion of links (which could then still be hand-edited to a working
link).

Network resilience and peering would also be an issue. A country can always
filter you out I guess, a la Great Firewall.

The sync issues would be interesting. Not sure what the people using the
hosting see (a db? a filesystem?). Do-able, tho.

(Off the top of my head, I'd go for a DVCS-like model, where it's fully peer-
to-peer, automerge when we can, punt to a human when we can't).

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morphle
We can accomodate you in the Netherlands. As the first ISP here I know my way
around. We applied to Ycombinator this cycle with a site that we host
ourselves, but I am happy to help find you any type of hoster you'll like.
Merik at Knoware.nl

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zitterbewegung
I would host in sealand by havenco see <http://www.havenco.com/>

~~~
randallsquared
Havenco is _gone_. They never had more than a few servers hosted there (I
managed one of them back in 2001-2002), and as far as I know, they aren't
accepting new orders. They had pretty constant problems when they were up, due
basically to not having the funding required to do what they were doing.

Ryan Lackey, the former CTO of Havenco, had a postmortem of the company up for
a while, but it seems to be gone right now.

~~~
allenbrunson
it used to be hosted on metacolo, which seems to also be gone. but i found
another copy here:

    
    
      http://www.securitytechnet.com/resource/rsc-center/presentation/Defcon/11-2003/dc11-havenco.pdf

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webwright
As long as you're posting anonymously, you should tell us all who your current
(vaginal) host is.

~~~
eru
There's nothing wrong with vaginas.

~~~
webwright
His word, not mine. :-)

