Regardless of how the hosting provider feels about the content they're hosting, it's very unprofessional to terminate a contract so absolutely with no warning. They could have easily given the site a few days, if not weeks, to migrate to another service, but they instead chose to immediately kill not just the hosts of voat.co but all of the hosts under the account, which included an entirely unrelated blog with scientific papers.<p>I find it scary that so many commenters find this to be a natural course of action for a hosting provider to take. A hosting provider caring about what I host, other than whether or not it's legal, is just as absurd as my ISP caring about what packets I send (once again, other than the legality of them). While a hosting provider's role isn't nearly as "utility" as an ISP, it's certainly close and I would be appalled if the majority of hosting providers actually took stances like this. A minority is to be expected, no different than a book publisher only publishing Christian books, but if the average book publisher was expected to publish only Christian books, I would be quite frightened.
For those who need the context -- when Reddit had that big bust-up last week about banning subreddits like /r/fatepeoplehate, aggrieved commenters were recommending that others migrate to voat.co. That effectively means that voat.co recently absorbed the slimy runoff of Reddit's worst element.<p>Given that, it isn't wholly surprising that their hosting service wanted no part of them.
So they were lying in the github repo about "based in Switzerland, no censorship policy as long as content is legal in Switzerland" when it was hosted in Germany on one of the cheapest providers all along, subject to a ton of speech restrictions in law?
The thing I've found completely baffling about the apparent Voat exodus (although not from any Reddit communities I'm a part of, as it happens) is that nobody knows what the organizational structure or credibility of Voat is, and nobody even reliably knows who's behind the site.<p>The most that you can find is the GitHub source, which says it's "based in Switzerland, no censorship policy as long as content is legal in Switzerland". This may or may not be true. This was certainly not <i>usefully</i> true, if there's a German host with censorship powers.<p>The user agreement (<a href="https://voat.co/help/useragreement" rel="nofollow">https://voat.co/help/useragreement</a>) calls itself "a legal agreement between you and us", with no definition of "us". It also has a DMCA response policy, which strikes me as odd for a Switzerland-based company (but maybe this is normal?).<p>The about page (<a href="https://voat.co/about" rel="nofollow">https://voat.co/about</a>) claims it's a project from two Swedish college students. Even assuming that this is true, this isn't such a best-case scenario: we've seen many examples of sites (4chan, Reddit, etc.) where the founders were in high school or college and were at least somewhat in favor of unrestricted speech, but as their sites grew, and as they themselves grew, they've changed their minds. (Incidentally, parts of the brain that regulate appropriate social behavior, like the prefrontal cortex, only fully develop by age 25.) Even if everything Voat says about themselves is true, we should worry that in a couple of years they'll grow a conscience too.
Is it really <i>that</i> surprising that a hosting company doesn't want to host a site containing a tonne of hate speech?<p>There's no amount of money Stormfront could pay me to host their vile outpourings; why should a small site hosting hate speech of every type kick up a big fuss about similar treatment?
Hah. In that thread they have a comment near the top complaining about "censorship and outrage culture", and then on their home page they have a popular thread recommending that they all contact hosteurope.de's customers (<a href="https://voat.co/v/whatever/comments/146949" rel="nofollow">https://voat.co/v/whatever/comments/146949</a>).
I'm curious if someone with a lot of experience hosting in (or knowledge of hosting in) various countries in Europe, would opine on which are the least restrictive when it comes to speech?
It's very unfortunate and reminds me of <a href="http://paulgraham.com/say.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/say.html</a>
Hosteurope notes that this claim was completely false: <a href="https://archive.is/TqQDn" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/TqQDn</a> It appears to have been a lie from Voat to solicit funds.