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Clayton Dewey

There's a nonprofit whose website I support that monitors the far right. They want to set up a mirror site in Iceland (or other country with strong data sovereignty laws) in case the Trump administration takes down their website.

Does anyone have Icelandic hosting companies they recommend? The website is in

:boosts_appreciated: boosts appreciated :boosts_appreciated:

One company on my list is gandi.net

I've used them for a long time and are really happy with their service. They're a French company and have strong privacy and security practices.

@clayton Gandi is nominally a French company, but it was acquired by TWS a few years ago, a Dutch company with an awful reputation for absurd price hikes and bad support/service, and now operates as a subsidiary of them.

@clayton you might want to look into:
- 1984.is
- flokinet.is/

Also, mind a DM? I have some expertise in this kind of thing, but better to talk a bit less publicly.

flokinet.isFlokiNET: Secure the NetSecure, Stable, Anonymous, Offshore Privacy focused Hosting Services

@rysiek a dm would be most welcomed!

@clayton

@baldur may be able to help.

(Baldur, please forgive my presumption in calling you in like this.)

@CppGuy @clayton Not my expertise but I boosted the post as I have at least a couple of mutuals who might have ideas hosting in Iceland.

@flaki nice, thanks for the suggestion!

@vista ha, wow yeah this is legit. Oh the times we're living in...

@clayton It's not Iceland, but Exoscale in Switzerland might be a good shout?

@greg_harvey cool, I'm checking them out now and they look like a good fit.

@clayton I work for a Drupal specialist company, as it happens, if you need any help with this. 😃

@clayton And I just realised from your pinned post that you're a Drupal specialist yourself. I'll shut up then. 😂

@clayton

If you don't mind a suggestion from an earlier era of the internet when entities also tried to keep websites suppressed?

Ensuring that there are enough copies in enough hands so that the site cannot be deleted no matter how many times it is taken down will be safer than having a single mirror under a single corporate thumb. There's still the risk that somebody at a parent company or a datacentre or a transit provider a legal firm may be able to exert pressure.

Also consider distribution methods like bittorrent, much easier than passing CDROMs around for sure.

There may be caveats around ensuring the integrity of data as it is passed from one person to another, of course, but at least the data itself will live.

@paule @clayton Sure, I think I can! We're running @freistilbox at Hetzner in Germany, specialised in high-performance Drupal.

But if a mirror is all you need, it shouldn't really matter what the CMS is. You'd want to pull the content as a static site that you can then host anywhere (I'd still choose Hetzner).

I'd be happy to discuss this on a call. Simply book a slot in my calendar via the Contact page on our website!

@clayton Don't know how well they do under fire, but flokinet.is claims privacy. I think the main way people do privacy on those cPanel/WHM hosts like that is just to pay with cryptoshit and never verify an email address and connect over a VPN and just be anonymous so that they can't sell you out, more so than Icelandic companies not selling you. Anyway can't vouch for them at all but been using flokinet.is.

@scrottie right on. I think it's less about privacy, the group is public and known (just keeping them anonymous for now while I do this initial research for them), so it's more about them being hosted somewhere with stronger free speech laws and a company that will fight for them.

You're the third person to recommend flokinet!

@clayton @scrottie Flokinet and 1984 are both excellent options. They will defend sites technically and legally, and are run by anti-fascists. Greenhost in the Netherlands is also a respected company in this space run by anti-fascists.

@clayton I've used in the past, and found to be acceptable:

1984.is (mom n' pop operation)

OrangeWebsite dot com (cPanel)

@clayton also, until more cables are laid, latency & bandwidth between Iceland and the US is not as good as to western Europe. if that's a concern, you might look into hosting in Europe, somewhere with decent privacy laws.

I have less experience with that, but Luxembourg and Norway have been on my radar (my email lives in Norway)

@deutrino hmmm that is good to know and probably important to consider for this group, thanks for pointing this out.

@clayton Go with 1984 Hosting. They are WordPress oriented but as long as you're good with PHP and MySQL/MariaDB then that shouldn't be an issue.

This often isn't the case of the law enabling data sovereignty but your host fighting against litigation.

@clayton Well, the European Union has the same data privacy laws in every member state, theoretically. Choose Ireland if you're a big US tech bro and don't want authorities to look too closely. ;-)

Switzerland has strong privacy regulations, but also generous authorization for national intelligence and internet surveillance.

@clayton I came here to recommend 1984 and I see you've already gotten that rec, so seconding.

@clayton not in Iceland, but I’ve personally had good experiences with xor.st. They allow almost anything, including TOR exit nodes - which signifies that they care about online freedom.

@clayton we operate Datacenter in multiple locations, our main one is based in Iceland and the other in Netherlands, Finland and Romania. We are happy to host and support such websites and do no accept foreign requests or court orders and can move websites between datacenter any time.
Reach out if we can help in any way

@flokinet awesome! Y'all sound amazing!! I'll be sure to recommend you to the group I'm working with. I'll reach out if I need anything else.

Thank you for hosting and protecting the websites of those doing good in the world.