I'm not OK with the precedent that Amazon set by kicking Parler off AWS.

I'd like to start a discussion about how to host platforms that big tech might dislike. I've split my concerns into 3 categories:

A simple Linux Box, a Domain, SSL certificates

I'd get my certs from Let's Encrypt, but I vaguely remember reading on HN that they might fold under woke pressure easily. Not aware of a specific incident, but they are EFF-adjacent, so it's believable. I've just noticed that the certificate Ovarit uses is Amazon-signed. What gives?

For a simple 5-bucks-a-month VPS, I'm aware of the following mainstream options:

US:

• GoDaddy (the name alone ...)
• Digital Ocean
• ....? not American so idk

EU:

• Hetzner
• Strato
• OVH

Without going into details, I've used both OVH and Hetzner for personal projects. OVH was very meh, Hetzner was exellent as far as I could tell.

Domain Registrars: Only thing I have to add here is that thanks to GDPR, mainstream EU domain registrars offer Whois protection by default.

More Advanced Infrastructure and "Buisness to Buisness" Services

• **Cloudflare: ** For Load Balancing / DDOS protection. They have a track record of defending very offensive customers against activist pressure.

• PayPal: ?

• Stripe: ?

• Supposedly running a mail-server and mass-emailing is a pain in the ass, so many companies outsource that to MailGun-esque startups. This has data safety implications on top of creating dependencies. Anybody know good Open Source solutions that simplify emailing?

• DevOps: I've noticed that Ovarit uses GitLab over GitHub, which I like a lot. All relevant DevOps tools that I'm aware of are self-hostable. Any concerns on this front? I think as long as you self-host those, you are OK.

DACH-Specific Issues

DACH stands for "Deutschland, Österreich (AT), Schweiz (CH)", i.e. Germanophone countries. DACH Countries have "Impressumspflicht", the legal requirement to have an Impress with your name and address on anything that can be constructed to be a publication. As far as I'm aware, these laws cannot be trivially circumvented with PO boxes or anonymous LLCs, at least not legally.

This is the reason I don't host anything public-facing at the moment. I just don't feel like doxxing myself.

I know it's a long shot, but does anybody have some ideas regarding Impressumspflicht?