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Comment by null_object | Hacker News Reader

I can’t believe how lightheartedly you are taking this. (edit: I guess your initial reaction when the domain was reinstated was probably a bit of euphoria).

This faceless corporation simply took away your property without explanation or warning, and didn’t even feel any obligation to explain why.

For many people the consequences might have been losing their own or even their family’s source of income.

Their behavior was despicable and callous.

When did these tech companies start thinking they were all-powerful and above the law like this?

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> I can’t believe how lightheartedly you are taking this.

What is the alternative though?

The web has turned in to this massive mess where most of us don't have the ability to do anything without having to rely on some ban happy mega corp.

Even something that was built to be decentralized like email has turned in to a (sort of) centralized architecture, try hosting your own email, everything goes in to spam.

Host a website and piss off some kid with $5 to spare, you get ddosed.

The web is owned by the big corps, as long as everyone of us come together and fix this it will be a very long time (if ever) before we have a truly decentralized internet.

So yeh, the only option I have is to take this lightheartedly and move on.

I have a cheap VPS, host my own email, host my own websites, never had any of the problems you are describing.

I’m trying to understand the point of this anecdote. Plenty of people who use Cloudflare could post the same comment. And there are plenty of self hosting horror stories involving smaller solutions.

On the topic of hosting email specifically, I thought it was pretty universally accepted as a tricky prospect. It’s possible to get right, yes, but tricky nonetheless.

I too host my sites manually. What happens when your site that's hosted on the VPS gets noticed by a trigger happy skiddie? What happens when they start eating up all your bandwidth? Your VPS provider will be more than happy to null route you.

For the websites you own, you registered your domain with someone right? What happens when that company decides to have some AI decide if you are doing something illegal?

Until today I "never had" any of these issues as well, the main issue here is we have to rely on large companies (or small companies for that matter tbh) to do "the right thing", and we don't have many options to solve it. I got super lucky some folks browsing HN decided to get my post some attention.

> Your VPS provider will be more than happy to null route you.

That is a lot better than deleting your domain and refusing to talk to you. If you need more bandwidth your VPS host will be more than happy to take your money. And short downtimes are not really much of a problem for personal websites and email. Losing your domain name is a much bigger concern.

> For the websites you own, you registered your domain with someone right? What happens when that company decides to have some AI decide if you are doing something illegal?

Has that EVER happened with any registrar that is not also handling other things like hosting or CDN for you? With just the domain all they could base their "AI" on would be the domain itself unless they go actively prodding third-party servers.

> What is the alternative though?

> The web has turned in to this massive mess where most of us don't have the ability to do anything without having to rely on some ban happy mega corp.

That's absolutely not true. You're drinking the HN/startup koolaid if you think everything should be on CloudFlare/AWS/Google/Microsoft/etc and there's no other way. Obviously VCs would love for you to think that but it doesn't make it true.

Domain registrars are plentiful. Dedicated server providers are plentiful. Hell, "shared hosting" is still a thing and may be perfectly appropriate if all you need is a static site.

Pick a mid-sized company whose objective is to deliver great service rather than one whose objective is either "growth and engagement" or to monopolize the internet. Ideally pick one within your jurisdiction so that you have more recourse if things go wrong.

Agree your point. But I think Microsoft doesn’t belong to this group. I never read an auto ban story from Microsoft. And my experience is that you can talk to a human customer service from Microsoft.

There was just an article on HN 2 days ago[1], with duplicates, about Microsoft opaquely locking Minecraft users out of their accounts, with little in the way of acceptable recourse (give Microsoft your phone number and pray).

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31551846

Don't run to another big corp for safety. Go small maybe medium.

I signed up for an email address once, then they locked my account requiring a phone number because of "suspicious activity", where obviously the only suspicious activity was that they didn't have my phone number.

It would never happen in a real enterprise like AWS. Cloud flare is small potatoes compared to Amazon.

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