This article is kind of depressing, when did hosting your own server become a lost art?<p>One of parler’s problems was they didn’t scrub headers which made it very obvious they were using AWS and which AWS services they were using.<p>AWS is just a bunch of APIs - they could have colo’d their front end or put a bunch of varnish servers in front if it at a colo and nobody would have been the wiser they were using AWS on the backend (assuming their AWS account didn’t have Parler Inc in the payment details). From there getting taken down from one colo would just be an issue of spinning up a front end at another colo. Front that setup with a couple CDNs and now you have layers where you have to coordinate between half a dozen companies to bring the site down completely, meanwhile your data is safe in AWS because nobody knows your using AWS or even if they do it’s hard to pick you out from the millions of other AWS users.
"I'm eager to give big social media sites like Facebook and Twitter a run for their money."<p>Hosting servers isn't the hard part, and it isnt the same as running a social media platform. This blog is riddled with neivete and a misuse of the word "fear" to get clicks. Don't even get me started on trying to use the "they didn't come for me" quote when relating to <i>online posts</i>. Government != Private companies<p>If you want to compete you will require moderation, period. Illigal and disturbing content will have to be removed and sectioned off from your users. Or do really you want the average user seeing a trending video of gore and targeted harassment of people? Even 4chan moderates.<p>You will have to serve hundreds of petabytes of image and video data - you will have to use cloudflare or some other cache mechanism like everybody else. Cloudflare was <i>the</i> reason 4chan was kept alive btw.<p>You need lawyers on retainer that understand law pertaining to your business. If not then you're left open to civil liabilities anyone can exploit.<p>You need money. You will require algorithms for promotion of content which requires user tracking which requires databases that contains peoples habitual information.<p>You've now created facebook and twitter or you're running on investor money. Eventually you will have to sell out your users.<p>People forget that the "big social media" all came from the same small places when it was a lot harder to do ( do you know how much more expensive bandwidth used to be?). The difference is they got popular and smelled the money. It takes a very special community to not do the same.
I grew up in an era where running your own servers was just generally accepted practice.<p>It's been fascinating watching how dramatically that viewpoint has shifted over the years to the point where it is now a novel idea to do so.
I can’t help but find the introductory quote a bit much, given that Parler’s moderation scheme (judgement by other Parler users) typically resulted in the removal of all opinions other than those held by the majority of Parler users.<p>In any case, Parler’s problem (well, one problem of many) was that they had MASSIVE hardware requirements that dramatically cut down on the number of places that could practically host them.<p>It also seems that despite assurances and good sense, Parler had deeply tied itself to Amazon’s APIs, making migration off AWS slow even once a host was found.
> Most datacenters only lease by the rack. These racks can hold up to 42 servers and are far too expensive.<p>Hurricane Electric will happily lease you an entire rack for $400/mo with a 1Gbps connection. I would argue that, in comparison to the prices the OP mentions, Hurricane Electric's price is quite good. Also, there is one fewer middleman between you and the Internet (and power, and rack space, etc, and the front door, etc).<p>(I believe that $400 number does not include vast amounts of power, so the actual price tag for filling that rack with conventional hardware may be rather higher. On the other hand, depending on your use case, fitting in a small power budget may be straightforward.)
I’m not sure running their own hardware and relying on an ISP or colocationg at a datacentre would help Parler compared with renting services/VMs from someone like Amazon.<p>Just about all ISP have terms and conditions that prohibit use that they find offensive.<p>Data Foundry, mentioned in the article, acceptable use policy is below and I’m sure could be used to kick out Parler<p><a href="https://www.datafoundry.com/legal/aup" rel="nofollow">https://www.datafoundry.com/legal/aup</a>
Does there exist a de-platform proof way of hosting something on the internet?<p>Even if you host your own server on your own premises they could forbid you from using the location, shut off your electricity, etc.<p>Is it possible to host a website entirely on bittorrent? I suppose there's also IPFS but I'm not entirely familiar.<p>Maybe once solar is cheap enough you could launch some sort of array of powered drones into the sky that follow the sun that send files to people via P2P - solar mesh network if you will.
Running on a shoestring budget is not very interesting. What would be interesting is running a well funded production level data center in a completely hostile political environment with every other commercial entity trying to refuse business with you.
Nice post and inspiring, but one small point bother me: "I feel GREAT not living in FEAR". Well, you just traded the fear of being shut down by big corpo for the fear of having your hard disk or memory or fan or whatever fail.
The photos though.. If you are reading this remove the server or the rug/carpet!!!! All the fluff from the carpet and the dust from the floor invading your box and will be chocking the fans!!!
This made me realize that one reason many of us use cloud hosting is that our home internet is lacking, whether through caps or the lack of fiber deployment. It was easy for Congress to railroad the rights of private property owners and cities for 5G but they can’t seem to do it for fiber... Maybe this can get Conservatives to realize that unfettered broadband access lessens the power of the hosts.
This article has ZERO information about Parler or it's tech stack. Total clickbait. Yet it still has 100+ upvotes and has generated 100+ comments.
Very good one, and timely<p>It's been an obsession of mine for a long while, and i am overjoyed it has been written down<p>I have not been comfortable with the Cloud or nothing and the fact that it looks like it no longer possible.<p>This video also helps for people who want to go into self hosting<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_vGdnBqeE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_vGdnBqeE</a>
I doubt running your own server is always the right solution.There are pros and cons for and against hosting yourself. A small company without dedicated security team may get hacked and all customer data exposed, for example.<p>Contrary to what this article insinuates, the vast majority of companies do not have to worry about violating the terms of services of cloud providers and other external services, because they don't offer services designed to violate besaid terms of services.<p>As for Parler, of course they should have seen that coming. It's pathetic that they didn't. They should have looked at sites like the Piratebay for how to do it and prepared a bit more.
The "reason" given why Parler failed is awfully glib and one dimensional. You can't just serve content to millions of people per day and think you can just up and move to another provider.<p>Had Parler just moderated their posts like they were asked to do, they would still be around. You can still have right wing, even extreme right wing views without calling for violence or organizing insurrections. The fact they essentially refused to moderate and let calls for violence fester on their platform is why they were shut off.
I'm picking up a weird sentiment from these articles about parler.<p>Something like... shoving someone so they fall and break their teeth, and then trying to blame them and saying, "it's your own fault for having such poor balance". A coping strategy for guilt? I just meant to harm you <i>a little bit</i>?
this is all good except when people in a different country try access your service, they start to complain about your service being slow due to massive latency and lagging.<p>and then you wished you would have went to the cloud after all.<p>now you've got another problem.
> freedom minded<p>> tech oligarchs<p>...here we go.<p>I really struggle to understand how some folks didn’t realize they were using other people’s things until recently. Maybe the fact that they weren’t physically in a space was hiding the proverbial threshold crossing activity that takes place a dozen or so times as you travel to twitter.com.<p>It <i>is</i> free speech to kick someone off your platform. Freedom minded individuals seem to think freedom only goes in one direction. I will defend DJTs right to tweet stupid shit all day and every day, just as I’ll defend Twitter’s right to kick him off the platform.