TWG is exploring server hosting alternatives

Hi @dphiffer , thank you for your initiative and your very clear message.

Maybe you have thoughts on hosting providers, we'd welcome your input!

As far as I'm concerned, I have a positive experience with the French cloud provider Scaleway (ex Dedibox).

I've been a customer since 2006. I even worked for Scaleway for a while in 2018. I still have a few contacts there.

Scaleway's prices are very close to those of Hetzner.

I see one limitation of Scaleway compared to Hetzner: Scaleway servers can only be located in Paris, Amsterdam or Warsaw.

I see that the server hosting social.coop is currently located in Helsinki.

dig social.coop +short
65.109.113.162
$ curl -s ipinfo.io/65.109.113.162 | jq
{
  “ip": ‘65.109.113.162’,
  “hostname": ‘static.162.113.109.65.clients.your-server.de’,
  “city": ‘Helsinki’,
  “region": ‘Uusimaa’,
  “country": ‘FI’,
  “loc": ‘60.1695,24.9354’,
  “org": ‘AS24940 Hetzner Online GmbH’,
  “postal": ‘00100’,
  “timezone": ‘Europe/Helsinki’,
  “readme": ”https://ipinfo.io/missingauth”
}

As the server is already hosted in Europe, I don't think there would be any change in network latency to move it to Paris, Amsterdam or Warsaw.

Alternatively, there's the OVH option, which also offers servers at competitive prices.

Don't hesitate to contact me if needed, I'll do what I can to help.

Have a nice day,
Stéphane

@Stéphane Klein thanks for these suggestions! I'll take a look...

We got a reply on our support ticket:

Dear Client,

According to 8.2. of our terms and conditions, pornographic or obscene material, content that offends common decency, as well as material that is likely to endanger children or young people morally are not allowed.

Pornographic content is basically understood to be the depiction of sexual acts which, on the one hand, depict a real sex-related event or, on the other hand, also include the depiction of a fictitious event. This includes all materials, not only videos.

We therefore accept e.g. stores for sex toys, as long as these pages are tastefully designed, but e.g. no hentai pages and no "sex-dating"-sites that allow explicit pictures and/or texts. Of course, the customer must always pay attention to the protection of minors.

As our ToS are clearly formulated in this respect, we see no need to amend or adapt them or to make a public clarification in this regard.

Kind regards
Michael Mattlener
Corporate Lawyer

Have we discussed this with Autonomic? https://autonomic.zone/, e.g., https://coopcloud.tech?

I support TWG's concern here and their decision on what to do next.

Personally I'd be arguing to use a cooperative hosting provider. I know this limits choice and also likely increases costs, but I'm not sure that cost is a key issue here? I work very closely with webarchitects.coop - a cooperative hosting provider based in the UK that owns and runs it's own hardware. It is (fingers crossed) close to closing a funding deal that will see it offering a new high performing cloud hosting service utilising the open source Openstack platform. Prices will be competitive.

@Graham 

Personally I'd be arguing to use a cooperative hosting provider.

I just want to +1 this, and @Lynn Foster's point that this would be an application of cooperative principle 6. (Re-)decentralising the net requires experimenting with commons approaches at every level of the stack. Every time an infrastructure chokepoint is exposed, we need to interpret it as damage and organise around it.

@Danyl Strype do you know the author of this article or who took/is in this picture? It’s in Seattle and I wonder if it’s a group of activists the me and my friends can work with! (I live in Seattle)

@Ammar I'm the author of the article. The graphic is one I found using the openverse.org media search engine. Links to the source, a Flickr account, can be found at the bottom of the article. Are you from the same group as person who contacted me via SubStack? If not, I could at least connect you to each other.

Side note: helping groups find and work with each other is the goal of the Murmurations protocol;

https://murmurations.network/

@Danyl Strype Thanks Danyl, yeah we're from the same group, I've shared your article with them