Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against Mastodon servers raise the bar on the workload and technical skills of the people maintaining the servers.
This can lead to consolidation of servers. For example, CloudFlare could wind up hosting many of the larger Mastodon instances, as they get attacked. Following this path, the DoS attackers "win".
Perhaps best if instead of consolidation, more federation is used, and more distribted servers are set up. More techs can learn to host. :)
@jebba I really wish more people would reg on my server. I provide the service as is with no guarantees, but I carefully persist data that should be persisted by #ActivityPub. Federation costs me money, not the usage of the server currently, and even hosting a hundred more people wouldn't drive my costs too much up. BTW, I'm paying 30-ish bucks a month for hosting myself.
Cloud storage adds another subtlety, in that many servers can wind up hosting AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft), Google, etc., all of whom would love to control a large Fediverse.
@jebba #DigitalOcean was promoted by #mastodon organisation as the place to host. I assume they aren't evil, kinda. The issue with running on real hardware I have is that I lose data at least partially due to hardware failure.
I used to pay #Hostwinds which is a small indie American data center, but here I went with DO.
Do they just upsell #AWS?
It's a hard problem, in that in the end, you're still on a corporate / military network.
I'm not saying it is a solution, but it may be worth considering hosting in countries like Iceland, that have more protections (see: Icelandic Modern Media Initiative).
No matter what the hardware is, you should still have backups, as they can just power off your server. :)
I don't know Digital Ocean's physical network offhand.
Looking up DigitalOcean, they are publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. NYSE:DOCN for search.
The largest institutional investor, located in NYC, has very little about themselves on their website:
Other major investors include the usual Blackrock, Vanguard, JP Morgan Chase, etc.
I'll leave it to you to judge the evilness. ;)
@jebba thanks, I'll look into it.
I have backups, but they are irregular and if they'd power-off, I'd lose some data.
But idk, I'm pragmatic here. This stuff is a hobby for me, I'm close to set up a cluster and daily backups some day, in the meantime I'll do the cloud thingie.
Can you suggest a nice host where I can easily copy Ubuntu boxes, point my DNS and migrate from a VC provider? I'll look at the Iceland... Thanks for the pointer!
"Iceland ISP free speech" turns up a few:
https://www.orangewebsite.com/
Good for DNS, looks like they do hosting now too:
Thinking further on this, hosting in places like Iceland, Finland, Romania, maybe Bulgaria (still?), etc. can be a way to differentiate your server from others.
"Hosted in Iceland"
A geographically diverse Fediverse increases it's strength.
@jebba (most of it is cloud storage).