Are there any lists that have been compiled of decent alternatives? I know about Bongino's payment processor, but I'm not sure it looks super-robust or well thought out.
Also, can Cloudflare be trusted? They seem to be much more committed to free speech than everyone else, but there are some worrying signs. My site shouldn't be super-controversial, but I certainly don't trust it with Stripe or DO these days.
Cloudflare has dropped customers for political reasons before. Stormfront was the most high-profile, but I'm positive not the only one.
For payment processing, Matt and Blonde advertise Charity Swipes on their show. They focus on physical card processing but I believe they do have electronic processing as well. Never had need of them myself but might be worth a look.
Never heard anything positive or negative about Digital Ocean.
Unfortunately Digital Ocean was chearleading the de-platforming of Parler and refused them service when AWS booted them. Apparently they have a bunch of woke DEI shit on Twitter as well.
CloudFlare dumped 8chan for no reason. (Yes, a manifesto was posted there, and quickly removed by moderators, so what, that's social media.) So, no, they cannot be trusted. On the other hand, they have been more free-speech supporting than most other tech companies, and the left can't wait till Matthew Prince, the CEO, retires or dies and is replaced.
See Joshua Moon's article on this.
There may not be any large tech corp that doesn't at least partly capitulate to woke. You just can't exist in that industry without its pressure and influence. CoinBase has somewhat resisted with their no-politics rule.
Notably, Stripe threatened to cut off VDare.com several months ago, but has not yet done so (whereas PayPal did in 2017).
DDoS-Guard
BuyVM. Otherwise maybe Vultr or Hetzner (they just opened a US location)
Wow, I haven't heard of any of those. Do you know if BuyVM, Vultr and Hetzner are free-speech oriented, or are they just obscure enough not to get targeted?
BuyVM is pretty strong on free speech, you can find multiple treads about it on lowendtalk, like these: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/167840/free-speech-vps-kvn-hosting-for-both-right-wing-and-left-wing-dissident-content/p1 https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/164583/free-speech-hosting-dedicated-server/p1 (Francisco = BuyVM)
Also a plus with BuyVM: free DirectAdmin license for your VPS.
Vultr and Hetzner are pretty big, but relatively non-political. They arent as pozzed as Google Cloud or linode AFAIK.
Cloudflare did shut down political sites in the past, but it does seem like they do this only after a certain amount of media and political pressure. After all, 4chan and this very site are using cloudflare (you can check this in the SSL cert in your browser). When in Doubt use DDoS-Guard.
EDIT: BuyVM als has a Discord Server for support: https://buyvm.net/beware-the-moshbear/
LOL
Cool, thanks man!
No problem :) Just remember, no matter which provider you choose, do not forget so set up regular backups like a good boy. No system is safe from hardware failure, or fire (search "OVH Strasbourg fire" for more info)
Yep, agree on all fronts. Unfortunately crypto won't be viable for me at this point (although I'll accept it) because the audience is mostly normies.
Regarding Stripe, do you know by chance if Stripe cancels you, do they allow you to migrate saved cards to a new vendor, or do they just cut you loose, forcing you to have all of your customers re-enter their card data?:
https://stripe.com/docs/saving-cards
https://stripe.com/docs/security/data-migrations/exports
It seems almost vindictive if they treat you more harshly than a dissatisfied customer moving to one of their competitors, but I bet you they wouldn't be in a huge rush to transfer the data.
Just curious, do you have any details on the "massive gloating power trip" bit?
As I remember it, right before their IPO the New Zealand mosque shooting happened, and then a day or two after the Walmart copycat shooting, and the media was claiming it was all planned and broadcast on 8chan and Cloudflare (conveniently leaving Facebook out of it).
From what I've seen that Matthew Prince guy has talked a big game on free-speech, and has been very apologetic and hand-wringey these two times that they've caved to public pressure.
I'm a free speech absolutist, but these circumstances shift it from outrageous to unfortunately more understandable in my mind.
Selfishly, I'm not trying to host anything radioactive, just mildly controversial (although it could piss-off powerful people if it takes off) so I'm less concerned about Cloudflare, but the "massive gloating power trip" thing you mentioned has got me worried.
Thanks.
Cloudflare is huge and provides a lot of different services, of course, but for CDN and DDoS protection there's DDoS-Guard.
Not really anything directly equivalent to DO or AWS, but there are a couple of companies that offer VPS that are either very libertarian or openly sympathetic to non-woke views, though I suspect that unfortunately the latter would cut off a site or server if they considered it a potential risk to their business.
I won't list them here because I'm concerned about them being targeted by payment processors, which brings us to...
There's AlignPay, but I've never tried it. The fact that none of the larger non-woke site are already using it is a pretty big red flag IMO.
Yeah, I heard AlignPay launched with zero documentation. They don't seem serious, but maybe they've gotten better in 6 months?