>>32190
>Somehow Kiwifarms has managed to stay up, but it's owner has documented just how hard it is to keep it up and running. That's a lot more effort than most of us are willing to put in.
It's a pretty interesting study-case, and I have been keeping an eye on this situation, more out of curiosity than anything else. And, sadly I also don't think most people would have the technical knowledge or the means to do the same. Like, he had to think on everything:
1) He had to adapt an open-source anti-DDOs system called "C0nW0nk", sense Cloudflare dropped them. The site needs DDOs protection because it will get target.
2) He uses Epik as a domain registrar, because they have a proven track record that they won't just steal his domain (as it often happens).
3) He also use a .NET top level domain, which is operated by an american company called Verisign, which owns/operates all the .NET, .COM and a few other important domains. And this company could also seize the domain, but they also have a proven track record from only seizing domains after courts orders (like piracy sites and so on), which make so that anyone wanting to shutdown your domain has to go through the US justice system, which is a good thing if your content is legal in the USA. (Theoretically both, Epik, which is kiwifarms.net registrar, and Verisign, which owns all the NET domains, could seize his domain because "they feel like". So you have to think not only on "which company I'm doing business, but which company the companies I'm doing business are doing business with it themselves")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network
4) After solving this domain problem, you need to host the site itself, and that's a whole other can of worms, with their own sets of problem. First, there is a very limited number of Tier 1 providers (those are the companies responsible for literally putting the oceanic cables across the world), it's like 7 or 8 companies, and any of them could theoretically block you (as it happened when Zayo blocked them), or, most likely, force the people who you are doing business to drop you (as it happens when they forced TerraHost to drop Kiwifarms).
Initially Kiwifarms owner tried to do business directly with those Tier 1 providers (again, most people operating a site will never need to do that, because they will be using Cloudflare or Wix or whatever, this whole infrastructure is essentially invisible to the average person operating a site, this whole thing is taken care of automatically). But he soon realized that he alone was an easy pray, and the people would harass those multi billion dollar companies, who would drop him in a blink of an eye. So he essentially had to find companies who would be willing to work with him, as well as being pressured resistant, and those companies would themselves later on deal with those Tier 1 providers. They call it "Bulletproof hosting". For instance, currently he uses 3 providers: Artnet Sp, Shinjiru Technology Sdn Bhd, MEVSPACE. Which offers them an IP and means to connect to his site.
https://bgp.tools/dns/kiwifarms.net
Which leads to my next point:
5) To make things more practical, those providers don't actually host the site, but only connect to it, they are like a road to the site (the real host location gets hidden away). They are essentially cheap VPSs, this make things way simpler because, sense the site is oftentimes getting banned from services, you don't need to move things around, you just... find a new VPS and the game moves on. It make so that instead of taking days, it only takes a few minutes, just find a new VPS and point them to your host location.
6) As a last resource the site is also available on TOR, which bypasses both the limitations of needing a domain registrar/Tier 1 providers, sense all the traffic is encrypted. The bad thing is that the site it's slow and normies won't use it.
And all I mention don't even involve the other normal problems that go into running a site yourself, like making sure it won't get hacked and stuff . For anyone wanting to try to create their own cancellation proof site, Null keeps a list of the services he used through the years, as well as his experiences with them.
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/nulls-tier-list-for-internet-services.129513/