4 ms·

If you were refused by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Cloudflare, what alternatives are there?

by andomar 6y ago

justapassenger 6y ago
10 years ago no one was running in cloud. Internet still works outside of big tech data centers.
- jasonjayr 6y ago
  Sure, but frequently whole netblocks we blocked because spammers or IP ranges hosting + sending content undesired by the larger community. Peering ISPs would frequently drop routes + messages from whole data centers that would blatantly ignore spam complaints, which would force their hand to kick the offending customers off their platforms that caused harm to their other non-offending customers.
shiftpgdn 6y ago
There are thousands of colo centers out there that will take your business. Sure you have to buy the hardware up front but in the long run it'll be less expensive. The scary part would be fiber/backbone providers denying you a connection.
- drivingmenuts 6y ago
  Ultimately, this will come down to public vs. private rights. If infrastructure, no matter how vital, is privately funded, what rights are there vs infrastructure that is publicly funded. Further complications are infrastructure that is a mix of the two. Personally, I lean toward private infrastructure being able to set their own rules and if it’s public, then the public sets the rules. I am not sure when it gets to be a mix of the two.
  - shiftpgdn 6y ago
    What about peering agreements? What happens when cogent gets de-peered because they host a website accused of thought crimes?
    - drivingmenuts 6y ago
      The same thing that would happen in other situations. If you and I can’t come to terms, we part ways and don’t do business with each other. If one of us is affected because of that, then one of us needs to reconsider how best to remedy or work around that issue.
gameswithgo 6y ago
epik, apparently. at some point too when you notice that everyone thinks you are horrible maybe the problem is you.
- zarkov99 6y ago
  Yeah, that is a great mental heuristic: the majority is always fair and right. I am sure the Jews thought that back in 1930’s Germany. And the Christians in Rome, the Kolacks in Russia, the intellectuals in Mao's China, the wealthy Cubans when Castro took over and blacks in the US before the civil rights movement.
  - yanderekko 6y ago
    You grant too much. The people who are making these deplatforming decisions do not represent a majority or anything close to it. Perhaps they believe they will when their cultural revolution is complete and the dust has settled, but that has yet to be seen.
    - zarkov99 6y ago
      Unfortunately they do represent an overwhelming majority of the power in this particular domain.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    False equivalence. Freedom to persecute is not equal to freedom from persecution.
    - zarkov99 6y ago
      The equivalence is not in the persecution but on the validity of an heuristic that that dictates you are an asshole if a powerful majority says you are.
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  I see Facebook getting right on that.
nixgeek 6y ago
Oracle, IBM, Alibaba. On the smaller but still “millions of virtual machines” end of the scale: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode. Still have APIs and can give you instances in minutes. Hetzner and OVH also an option for the scale of infrastructure that Parler appears to require, although their “Dedicated Server” offerings (Bare Metal) often take 24-72 hours to deliver to customers. Or one of a thousand places to rent a rack and “DIY” with hardware from a vendor like Dell, HP, Supermicro, Lenovo, ZT, ... Plenty of examples exist of sites which have spent years or even decades online despite being unpopular or illegal, e.g. The Pirate Bay.
- stephankoelle 6y ago
  Hetzner has usually 10 minutes for bare metal.
  - nixgeek 6y ago
    In all the years I’ve been using them they’ve never hit 10 minutes for my orders. Usually > 4 hours and < 6 hours though on AX and other “standard specification” boxes. On PX where you can specify NVME and other configuration, more like 2-3 days (particularly if the order was placed on a weekend).
- joezydeco 6y ago
  Peter from The Pirate Bay recently commented on the Parler situation. TLDR: what a bunch of lightweight crybabies... https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1348194329005875203 https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1348194329005875203
millzlane 6y ago
Someone should ask Peter Sunde. https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an7pn/pirate-bay-founder-thinks-parlers-inability-to-stay-online-is-embarrassing https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an7pn/pirate-bay-founder-th...
bhhaskin 6y ago
If you still want to remain in the cloud? Shell game. Contract another company to setup and run everything on the cloud side and mask the traffic. Hiding the traffic can be as simple as front end proxies into a VPN to AWS. Or even just SSL traffic. AWS or what ever cloud provider would be none the wiser unless they are actively looking inside everyone's boxes. Which I highly doubt they are.
ipsocannibal 6y ago
Pick any country without an extradition treaty with the US and buy rack space there. Parler was easily nuked because its tech was amateur hour not because US cloud providers rule the internet.
- kondro 6y ago
  Good luck getting your 100Gbps+ sustained (from their actual requirements) of bandwidth in a non-extradition country to your primary audience in the USA.
  - ipsocannibal 6y ago
    Can you link to that requirements doc? I find it hard to believe that Parler required 100Gbps to run and meet a reasonable SLA. Also you can leverage multiple non-extradition jurisdictions to help offload bandwidth requirements while providing a hot spare cell.
xiphias2 6y ago
Yandex Cloud, Alibaba, CloudSigma, Hetzner....maywhen it comes to US politics, any non-US country allows more free speech than US itself.
rvz 6y ago
Self-hosting was a thing 10 - 15 years ago before the cloud hype and it is still an option today especially for those who have no choice but to do it.
bdcravens 6y ago
Investing in all the infrastructure to build a globally distributed architecture that is resilient? It's almost like we forgot that the web existed before the big cloud vendors. https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/20/facebooks-first-server-cost-85month/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/20/facebooks-first-server-cos...
BlackPlot 6y ago
Digital Ocean, VMware,..

If you were refused by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Cloudflare, what alternatives are there?

justapassenger 6y ago

10 years ago no one was running in cloud. Internet still works outside of big tech data centers.

jasonjayr 6y ago
Sure, but frequently whole netblocks we blocked because spammers or IP ranges hosting + sending content undesired by the larger community. Peering ISPs would frequently drop routes + messages from whole data centers that would blatantly ignore spam complaints, which would force their hand to kick the offending customers off their platforms that caused harm to their other non-offending customers.

shiftpgdn 6y ago

There are thousands of colo centers out there that will take your business. Sure you have to buy the hardware up front but in the long run it'll be less expensive. The scary part would be fiber/backbone providers denying you a connection.

drivingmenuts 6y ago
Ultimately, this will come down to public vs. private rights. If infrastructure, no matter how vital, is privately funded, what rights are there vs infrastructure that is publicly funded. Further complications are infrastructure that is a mix of the two. Personally, I lean toward private infrastructure being able to set their own rules and if it’s public, then the public sets the rules. I am not sure when it gets to be a mix of the two.
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  What about peering agreements? What happens when cogent gets de-peered because they host a website accused of thought crimes?
  - drivingmenuts 6y ago
    The same thing that would happen in other situations. If you and I can’t come to terms, we part ways and don’t do business with each other. If one of us is affected because of that, then one of us needs to reconsider how best to remedy or work around that issue.

gameswithgo 6y ago

epik, apparently. at some point too when you notice that everyone thinks you are horrible maybe the problem is you.

zarkov99 6y ago
Yeah, that is a great mental heuristic: the majority is always fair and right. I am sure the Jews thought that back in 1930’s Germany. And the Christians in Rome, the Kolacks in Russia, the intellectuals in Mao's China, the wealthy Cubans when Castro took over and blacks in the US before the civil rights movement.
- yanderekko 6y ago
  You grant too much. The people who are making these deplatforming decisions do not represent a majority or anything close to it. Perhaps they believe they will when their cultural revolution is complete and the dust has settled, but that has yet to be seen.
  - zarkov99 6y ago
    Unfortunately they do represent an overwhelming majority of the power in this particular domain.
- klyrs 6y ago
  False equivalence. Freedom to persecute is not equal to freedom from persecution.
  - zarkov99 6y ago
    The equivalence is not in the persecution but on the validity of an heuristic that that dictates you are an asshole if a powerful majority says you are.
imwillofficial 6y ago
I see Facebook getting right on that.

nixgeek 6y ago

Oracle, IBM, Alibaba. On the smaller but still “millions of virtual machines” end of the scale: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode. Still have APIs and can give you instances in minutes. Hetzner and OVH also an option for the scale of infrastructure that Parler appears to require, although their “Dedicated Server” offerings (Bare Metal) often take 24-72 hours to deliver to customers. Or one of a thousand places to rent a rack and “DIY” with hardware from a vendor like Dell, HP, Supermicro, Lenovo, ZT, ... Plenty of examples exist of sites which have spent years or even decades online despite being unpopular or illegal, e.g. The Pirate Bay.

stephankoelle 6y ago
Hetzner has usually 10 minutes for bare metal.
- nixgeek 6y ago
  In all the years I’ve been using them they’ve never hit 10 minutes for my orders. Usually > 4 hours and < 6 hours though on AX and other “standard specification” boxes. On PX where you can specify NVME and other configuration, more like 2-3 days (particularly if the order was placed on a weekend).
joezydeco 6y ago
Peter from The Pirate Bay recently commented on the Parler situation. TLDR: what a bunch of lightweight crybabies... https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1348194329005875203 https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1348194329005875203

millzlane 6y ago

Someone should ask Peter Sunde. https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an7pn/pirate-bay-founder-thinks-parlers-inability-to-stay-online-is-embarrassing https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an7pn/pirate-bay-founder-th...

bhhaskin 6y ago

If you still want to remain in the cloud? Shell game. Contract another company to setup and run everything on the cloud side and mask the traffic. Hiding the traffic can be as simple as front end proxies into a VPN to AWS. Or even just SSL traffic. AWS or what ever cloud provider would be none the wiser unless they are actively looking inside everyone's boxes. Which I highly doubt they are.

ipsocannibal 6y ago

Pick any country without an extradition treaty with the US and buy rack space there. Parler was easily nuked because its tech was amateur hour not because US cloud providers rule the internet.

kondro 6y ago
Good luck getting your 100Gbps+ sustained (from their actual requirements) of bandwidth in a non-extradition country to your primary audience in the USA.
- ipsocannibal 6y ago
  Can you link to that requirements doc? I find it hard to believe that Parler required 100Gbps to run and meet a reasonable SLA. Also you can leverage multiple non-extradition jurisdictions to help offload bandwidth requirements while providing a hot spare cell.

xiphias2 6y ago

Yandex Cloud, Alibaba, CloudSigma, Hetzner....maywhen it comes to US politics, any non-US country allows more free speech than US itself.

rvz 6y ago

Self-hosting was a thing 10 - 15 years ago before the cloud hype and it is still an option today especially for those who have no choice but to do it.

bdcravens 6y ago

Investing in all the infrastructure to build a globally distributed architecture that is resilient? It's almost like we forgot that the web existed before the big cloud vendors. https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/20/facebooks-first-server-cost-85month/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/20/facebooks-first-server-cos...

BlackPlot 6y ago

Digital Ocean, VMware,..