Oh please. Colo those servers and don’t publicly expose your relationship with the colo provider, spin up frontend proxies on other providers to hide your backend.

This is basic stuff, the problem with Parler is that their team seems to have no experience hosting controversial content.

How much do you think their aws bill was per month for hundreds of servers? Their traffic bill alone was probably worth it already. Don’t contract this work to ibm or deloitte or something and you’ll be fine

Yeah except you did talk about cost. Cost is not the issue here.

> surviving deplatforming is much more difficult than armchair orange website architects seem to acknowledge.

Somehow the internet is full of websites (some of which probably had much higher traffic) that did just fine though

I do agree with parent that this is an interesting political hypotheical though. There was so much media focus on Parler for a while and ultimately AWS was exonerated as the good guy in the mainstream narrative.

If Parler had self-hosted, would the potential wrath of the media just have turned to their upstream telco or whoever instead of AWS?

Colo facility or your transit provider doesn’t have a brand name it has to protect. You can look at gab, 4chan, tpb etc for counter examples. I’m actually fairly certain they would be fine on oracle, tencent or alibaba too

The Pirate Bay have managed.

lasagnaphil's comment provides some insight that proper planning would have involved not using WordPress and thus needing a fraction of the servers.