Andrew Torba needs to be teaching classes on how to keep hated web sites up.
Short check list: Host your own MTA (email server) and web server, which you run on metal you own and control, and distribute that metal in data centers around the country while you use a domain registrar resistant to social pressure.
In short, run your web site like it is 2004, before all the "X as a service" cloud crap started.
Yes, it takes more time, money, expertise and knowledge, but your site can't get turned off like a light switch by a critical service provider.
The guys who ran The Pirate Bay had some interesting ideas on how to "safely" run things on hosted computers.
IIRC they only hardware under their direct control was a front-facing routing/load-balancing system that routed all traffic through VPN connections. Then they'd host different aspects of the website's software stack (database, web server, etc...) using different providers, also routing all that traffic through VPN and the router/load balancer.
The idea was to "blend in" as much as possible so the hosting providers don't know they're hosing part of TPB. Which is made easier by all the traffic being encrypted by and routed through the VPN. And if they did get caught/shut down by one provider, all they had to do was update a file on the router/load balancer to point it to a replacement host using a different provider.
Then for that routing/load balancing bit they had multiple hot backups in various parts of the world that were set up to auto-switchover if the primary went down.
Yes, but TPB is under threat from numerous state level agencies, and KiwiFarms is not there, yet. I imagine that dissident anti global-homo voices might have to develop balancing techniques like TPB uses, eventually, but hopefully things never get to that point.
Problem being, the only people who know how to do that... were running websites in 2004. You don't see distributed systems on owned hardware even being proposed these days, unless your email address has DOD or MIL in it somewhere. And colleges are teaching the CLOUUUUUUUD, not Big Iron.
Yea, I know virtual is all the rage these days, but if you can't do cloud because all those services won't take you as a customer, well then, what else are you doing to do?
I got my CS degree in 2020, and distributed hosting was never even offered as a class, much less discussed as a hypothetical. I don't even have a ballpark on how big a web site has to get before it will bog down a typical linux apache/php/javascript server running directly on the server hardware, not virtualized.
I've long suspected that virtualization started to take off because server hardware was getting so powerfull dedicating one server to a single task like HTTP hosting was like squashing a mosquito with a 25 lb sledge.
The Computer Science program I went to didn't offer anything web related as a core subject. As an elective you could take a class in either PHP or .NET, but that was as far as web related content went. Nothing server related at all, and minimal training in linux command line. On the whole the CS program at my school was almost entirely about programming, and the sysadmin side of CS was never really discussed much. This was something I brought up with my advisor, and he said that ABET certification drove the courses, and there wasn't room for anything sysadmin side.
A bit of a tangent and not related to hosting but I find it interesting how they all preach the cloud, yet anyone working in IT who has to keep privacy as their highest good does not go with the cloud. I noticed this at work.
No one likes the cloud, no one wants to go with a cloud solution to the point where esoteric software is preferred to the cloud software which might be better but is harder to justify. Kind of happy people are this based at work.
I've heard that the open source forums have issues when the user count gets really high, but I will readily admit I don't actually know that for sure. I've never ran one, personally, so the back end management for it is a known unknown.
If by "really high" you mean ~500 simultaneous commenters, yes. Of all the dumbest things I've ever done, volunteering to run a gaming forum was the dumbest.
Andrew Torba needs to be teaching classes on how to keep hated web sites up.
Short check list: Host your own MTA (email server) and web server, which you run on metal you own and control, and distribute that metal in data centers around the country while you use a domain registrar resistant to social pressure.
In short, run your web site like it is 2004, before all the "X as a service" cloud crap started.
Yes, it takes more time, money, expertise and knowledge, but your site can't get turned off like a light switch by a critical service provider.
The guys who ran The Pirate Bay had some interesting ideas on how to "safely" run things on hosted computers.
IIRC they only hardware under their direct control was a front-facing routing/load-balancing system that routed all traffic through VPN connections. Then they'd host different aspects of the website's software stack (database, web server, etc...) using different providers, also routing all that traffic through VPN and the router/load balancer.
The idea was to "blend in" as much as possible so the hosting providers don't know they're hosing part of TPB. Which is made easier by all the traffic being encrypted by and routed through the VPN. And if they did get caught/shut down by one provider, all they had to do was update a file on the router/load balancer to point it to a replacement host using a different provider.
Then for that routing/load balancing bit they had multiple hot backups in various parts of the world that were set up to auto-switchover if the primary went down.
Also a Light-Switch-turned-Data-Kill-Switch they asked the Police to press after TPB got raided and they complied lol
Yes, but TPB is under threat from numerous state level agencies, and KiwiFarms is not there, yet. I imagine that dissident anti global-homo voices might have to develop balancing techniques like TPB uses, eventually, but hopefully things never get to that point.
Problem being, the only people who know how to do that... were running websites in 2004. You don't see distributed systems on owned hardware even being proposed these days, unless your email address has DOD or MIL in it somewhere. And colleges are teaching the CLOUUUUUUUD, not Big Iron.
Yea, I know virtual is all the rage these days, but if you can't do cloud because all those services won't take you as a customer, well then, what else are you doing to do?
I got my CS degree in 2020, and distributed hosting was never even offered as a class, much less discussed as a hypothetical. I don't even have a ballpark on how big a web site has to get before it will bog down a typical linux apache/php/javascript server running directly on the server hardware, not virtualized.
I've long suspected that virtualization started to take off because server hardware was getting so powerfull dedicating one server to a single task like HTTP hosting was like squashing a mosquito with a 25 lb sledge.
Why would a CS program teach web hosting? Or does CS mean something else besides Computer Science?
The Computer Science program I went to didn't offer anything web related as a core subject. As an elective you could take a class in either PHP or .NET, but that was as far as web related content went. Nothing server related at all, and minimal training in linux command line. On the whole the CS program at my school was almost entirely about programming, and the sysadmin side of CS was never really discussed much. This was something I brought up with my advisor, and he said that ABET certification drove the courses, and there wasn't room for anything sysadmin side.
Odd, all of my courses pushed distributed hosting, load balancing, cloud hosting, SaaS, HaaS, all of it. And that was a decade earlier.
A bit of a tangent and not related to hosting but I find it interesting how they all preach the cloud, yet anyone working in IT who has to keep privacy as their highest good does not go with the cloud. I noticed this at work.
No one likes the cloud, no one wants to go with a cloud solution to the point where esoteric software is preferred to the cloud software which might be better but is harder to justify. Kind of happy people are this based at work.
For a site like the farms, a bulletin board system would work well and be run stupid cheap.
I've heard that the open source forums have issues when the user count gets really high, but I will readily admit I don't actually know that for sure. I've never ran one, personally, so the back end management for it is a known unknown.
If by "really high" you mean ~500 simultaneous commenters, yes. Of all the dumbest things I've ever done, volunteering to run a gaming forum was the dumbest.
I don't know, never done it. I'll take your word for it.