I now stick to reputable “value” providers like BuyVM. Having an operator I can discord and get frank answers, as well as a commitment to privacy (Tor exit nodes welcomed), is nice.
Only if you let them.
Do people seriously NOT perform backups via independent methods utterly independent of their primary cloud service provider?
No one remembers Photobucket or the hundreds of other cloud services that went "poof" into the night?
There is no cloud, just someone else's computer - always have backups of some other means. A different provider with a different account, alternate mechanisms (i.e. email addresses with different email providers, etc.) to get to that data and accounts...
It's even easier now with VM's, snapshots, free open source backup software that understands all of that - fairly inexpensive commercial solutions like veem - there is zero excuse.
My favorite was a small SAAS provider that had all their backup infrastructure on AWS under the same account as the test/dev and operations - and someone got in and deleted it all. Partitioning - yes, it's an essential thing. And not just for technical. Separation of duties. Requiring concurrence by more than one person for critical operations. Lessons that should have been learned from past experience.
Peoples (especially developers) eyes glaze over with documents like NIST 800-53 - but all those controls exist from experience. The bigger/more critical your system is to your survival, the more of those controls you should have answers for!
And fuck me if I'm ever writing a BIND zonefile ever again.
Uh what? Really?
This doubles your failure surface.
For personal hosting I think one of the problems that makes this more complicated is that even as a group, you’re nobody’s biggest customer. You’re just a side business for someone selling hosting B2B, usually. I know that the local grocery store will make sure that they can still sell to local customers, because that’s the core of their business; I’m not so sure that cloud providers care much about my dinky website.
These companies are often unstable, so regular backups of anything you might be sad losing are vital. I recommend paying by the month, if that is available, and using this whitelist of low end providers who have been in business for a reasonable length of time[0].
Notorious for "Deadpooling", providers sell ultra cheap hosts. Run them on over-provisioned servers for a year or two and disappear overnight.
ex: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/08/1549222/20-low-end-...
What does that mean - what would it mean to "police legal content"?
And that's assuming they'll actually try to stick to their claim. I find that isn't the case when it is really put to the test.
Un-moderated, or "we have no content policy or acceptable use policy separate from the law".
The "reason Amazon gave" was "content that threatens the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens", with examples given in:
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
So it's a bad example of something being dismissed for ideological reasons, and a bad example of something whose reasons can be assumed when the answer was easily available.
That's an excellent reason to downvote something. It's simply not accurate.
Each action was ideological.
Without knowing what reason Amazon gave that leaves me to go look it up; I do, and see various news site quotes including "District Judge Barbara Rothstein sided with Amazon, which argued that Parler would not take down posts threatening public safety." quote on npr.org, and "Amazon told Parler it would boot the company from its web-hosting service [...] because of repeated violations of Amazon's rules" on NYTimes.com, I try to find an official looking source of exactly what reasons Amazon gave and get to the filing for the lawsuit/legal case between Parler and Amazon[1] which includes on page 3 "17. During this same time period, AWS claims that it received reports that Parler was failing to moderate posts that encouraged and incited violence, in violation of the terms of the CSA and AWS’s Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”). Exec. 2 Decl., ¶ 4; Ex. C (AUP). The AUP proscribes, among other things, “illegal, harmful, or offensive”". It's not clear here whether Amazon is claiming it was illegal or not, or whether it actually was illegal or not.
I google "inciting violence illegal usa" and get to a Cornell Law School[2] page on 18 U.S. Code § 2101 - Riots - saying, abridged, "whoever uses a facility of interstate commerce including but not limited to telegraph, telephone, radio, to incite a riot or promote or organize a riot, or aid or abet any person rioting or commiting any act of violence furthering a riot, shall be fined or imprisoned". Still not clear whether Parler was actually breaking the law or whether Amazon was alledging that they were, or whether this has been decided, or what exact reason Amazon gave.
I know there are arguments about whether hosts are or aren't responsible for content on them, or are just blind transmission systems, but I don't know which way it falls in which scenarios.
It reads more like a complaint about Parler being taken down than a helpful explanation, and could be more clearly and directly said "(policing legal content) means a company removing things against their content policies, even if the things are legal" in as much space and effort.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
The "whatever" being any cause they could justify their actions with.
The way it was written, it doesn't surprise me that people didn't read it that way, and downvoted. It comes against a background of people loudly claiming to be oppressed for ideological reasons and failing to support that claim or acknowledging that a serious act of violence has just occurred by people professing the same ideological reasons. At the very least, I felt it was worth pointing out how it reads, so that they might consider it without requiring others to specifically seek an assumption-of-the-best.