Hey Chris,
This is an industry and struggle that I personally know all to well. I'd be the first one to suggest hosting everything yourself and avoiding depending on any companies services if you can help it, but sometimes that isn't a viable option.
Hosting your own server is necessary these days, whether it's on your own connection or in a large data center with a trusted provider who doesn't care what you host. The level of shady business practices is insane when it comes to many domain registrars and hosting companies, and deplatforming continues to get worse in the industry.
I would suggest always completely avoiding all big tech hosting services like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, and doing thorough research before making use of any registrar or hosting company for anything.
It's getting harder and harder to find good companies who support free speech. Even Namecheap, one of the largest domain registrars who has been well trusted in the past, just decided to cut off services to all Russian customers due to the Ukraine crap. I know that myself and many others will be avoiding Namecheap in future, as they can no longer be trusted.
I'm not sure who your domain registrar is currently, but if you ever have issues with them, Epik is a good company that values freedom, and have taken on many who have been deplatformed by other companies, as you can tell from the propaganda on wikipedia:
Epik is an American domain registrar and web hosting company known for providing services to websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist materials. It has been described as a haven for the far-right because of its willingness to provide services to far-right websites that have been denied service by other Internet service providers.
Now to clarify, what I'm suggesting is, using CloudFlare free services as a proxy to protect your connection and have their CDN to cache static content, nothing more. Doing so requires nothing more than setting up a CloudFlare account, using their name servers, and configuring your web server IP via their DNS options. You would still be hosting everything yourself, but connections to your web server will be made via their network, providing all of the benefits that I previously mentioned, with no downsides. Their global network is gigantic, and they're unlikely to ever even notice this site is using their services.
As far as deplatforming goes, CloudFlare is better than most, but still not completely immune to cancel culture. They recently stated that they would continue to provide their services in Russia, even though the mob demanded they take action against Russia. They also continue to provide services to almost all free speech platforms after many years, including some of the biggest ones on the internet today which do not have good reputations.
The one exception being Gab, which managed to attract so much negative press and propaganda over the years that they have been deplatformed by not only every hosting company, but also numerous different companies including many banks. Gab has luckily had the resources and determination to build their own CDN to replace CF, which almost no other company is able to do.
In the highly unlikely event that this site ever had to become one of the biggest on the internet, attract a massive amount of unwanted attention, and CF actually noticed and decided to deplatform it... All you would need to do is update the name servers to point to your own ones instead of CF, and the site would be back online.
The alternative, would be not using CF from the start, and eventually having the site taken down effortlessly by bad actors. At which point, your internet would be offline and you would need to get Starlink to change your IP address and then setup CF to protect the new one, before being able to restore access to the site.
It's not a question of if the site gets attacked, but when that will happen. There are many entities who would very much like to see this site taken offline, and the only reason they haven't yet is because they don't know about it.
I know the terrible reputation Telstra has, so I'm sure much of the recent downtime has been due to their useless network, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the downtime is actually also due to attacks, and you wouldn't be able to detect many of the attack vectors used, because they would take out your upstream connectivity on the vulnerable Telstra network.
Hope this helps clear things up, and that you consider it, as I believe this is the most viable option to protect the site.
Best of luck,
Nano
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