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Ask HN: Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe?
55 points by needahost on Oct 23, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 50 comments
I'm posting under a different name for various reasons but I'm a regular contributor here.

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. ;)

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.

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&D? The Planet seems to be the go-to option here in the US. Any others?




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.


Speaking of a lack of "balls", don't be so reticent to say who your current hosting provider is.


Touche.

It's Rackspace. I haven't mentioned them by name to this point because truth be told, we like them a lot. Their services are top-notch and the team members we've dealt with are great people, top to bottom. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to anyone in fact, as long as there are no potential legal matters to be considered...

Their legal department is where we take issue. Despite the fact that we comply immediately with any and all founded legal claims, they refuse to back us on this new round of ridiculous and frivolous claims that directly impact our livelihood and our rights. The bottom line is they have a lot going on right now and it seems like legal just doesn't want to be bothered. So be it, onward and upward.


Great. I'm feeling that much better about the recent acquisitions of Slicehost and JungleDisk, both of which I pay to use.


To be fair, this is a big piece of doodoo for a host to have to deal with for the few $100 that they tend to charge.

If its anything more then a bare basic, just getting a lawyer to look over every piece of mail they get & advise them could cost well over what they make on hosting a site. Even on a high plan, if they are getting these love letters frequently.


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/


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


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


+1 for Hetzner. Even though the website is in German, I've always been able to get qualified help in English.

I don't know how they'll feel about C&D's, though. I've never been in trouble with my servers.


I have. They generally just forward the complaint on to you and tell you to deal with it. Unless lawyering gets involved, they don't give two hoots.


I looked on your sig, and malicelabs is one wicked site. You should make cartoons.


That's just a placeholder, until I get off my tuchas.


Awesome nonetheless.


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


"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


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.


Yeah, but it sort of depends on what kind of troubles he's having. He says it's not music business problems, so perhaps the protection they get wouldn't be worth much to him.


They do, but they're getting aquired Soon(tm) (before the end of the year, they say), so it might be a good idea to wait a while and see who is buying them before choosing them.


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?


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


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


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


Yup. More details here: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse


"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."


+1 here.

See https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/belief2005.php etc.


+1 bugmenot.com are hosted with these guys


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.


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


Thanks!


I asked about Euro-based hosts here recently:

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

That might help


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.


They shut down Muxtape.


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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!).


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.


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.


> 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).


I think this will work. You must be companies on three continents within different legal systems. You should not have to many ties as managers, but shareholders is fine as long as you do not travel to all thes countries. You must own fiber so you are not below an ISP at all.


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


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


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.


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


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


There's nothing wrong with vaginas.


His word, not mine. :-)


I named the host above (Rackspace) a few hours prior to your post. ;) And no, nothing wrong with vaginas...




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