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Comment by altairprime | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine if there was an API to rent servers within minutes or someday even seconds.

Imagine if everyone offering said API were capricious, inhumane, and uncaring about customer support, service terminations, and customer wind-down processes.

Now that you’ve pictured AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean, et al. more fully, that rules them out as available options for a long-term fanfic-centric erotica archive site that has specific and unusual legal concerns and threats to its existence incompatible with skittish Redbox-style compute providers.

Was there a particular cloud provider you were thinking of, that is not a ‘good night, sleep well, perhaps we’ll kill you in the morning’ service provider incompatible with AO3?

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There are a few "Nazi" hosting providers that could probably handle AO3. Maybe AO3 couldn't handle them.

> There are a few "Nazi" hosting providers that could probably handle AO3.

I mean, you’re welcome to supply ammunition against your own argument here — ‘every hosting provider with a server-provisioning API is either capricious or Nazi-welcoming’ is a pretty damning condemnation of your own point! But .. if that’s not your intent, then I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make in support of these APIs, and pithy sentence replies aren’t doing you any favors in conveying an interpretable opinion about AO3, server provisioning APIs and checks notes Nazis(?).

Are you suggesting that AO3 is akin to Nazi content? Are you suggesting that non-skittish hosting providers are uniformly also unprincipled? Are you equating erotica and fascism? I’d prefer to hear your explanation in your own words rather than be forced to infer bad faith participation here.

non-skittish hosting providers are uniformly also unprincipled

Yeah, this is what I'm saying (although absolute free speech is itself a principle). I wish it weren't so, but you're 99% right that the cloud isn't really usable for anything outside the Overton window, whether it's far left, far right, erotica, pro-suicide, extreme trolling, etc.

However if you're using Cloudflare you can "hide" your backend hosting provider and they usually won't kick you out because they don't take any reputation hit. So I still suspect a mainstream cloud (with good off-cloud backups) could work for AO3.

> I wish it weren't so

Same :(

> Are you suggesting that AO3 is akin to Nazi content? Are you suggesting that non-skittish hosting providers are uniformly also unprincipled? Are you equating erotica and fascism? I’d prefer to hear your explanation in your own words rather than be forced to infer bad faith participation here.

I think the point they're trying to make is that "normal" hosting providers like AWS, Azure or Google won't accept AO3 as a customer in the first place or yeet them the day the first DMCA email arrives or some Evangelicals yap about furries and they realize what their customer is doing. "Nazi" hosters (aka wherever Gab, Truth Social et al are hosted) or your average cybercrime "bulletproof hoster" are being used to deal with a lot of bullshit, or they just pipe any complaints straight to /dev/null - and they are used to dealing with cyberattacks of all kinds as well because they are a very, very juicy target for anyone from antifascist activists over cybercriminals wanting to cash in on Trump's Truth Social privileges to other nations' secret services that might want to sow chaos by manipulating Trump's Truth Social feed.

So... AO3 is nowhere near Nazi crap in terms of content, but a very, very similar threat model (exhaustion of customer support goodwill).

> I think the point they're trying to make

Their response is here and provides the desired clarification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295919

Nazi hosting providers probably wouldn't be too cool with the bulk of Ao3's participants or content.

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