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Comment by mrbluecoat | Hacker News Reader

> Upload your static site to us

How do you prevent abuse, like illegal material?

I'm not sure why it would be different from any other hosting provider. They do clarify what they consider abuse / forbidden content, and their operational policies though:

[1]: https://pico.sh/abuse

[2]: https://pico.sh/ops#code-of-content-publication

This is the challenge. This is tiny and delightful, but most hosting systems are monsters from a compliance perspective not because of a hunger for bureaucracy but that content moderation is SUPER hard.

> content moderation is SUPER hard

That's a bit over-exaggerated, it certainly isn't fun, nor very interesting, but it's doable, even for smaller organizations. Today is even easier as classification/labeling ML models are pretty good even without any fine-tuning/training on your own dataset.

you can easily find entire VMs for 2€/month on sites like LES

people assuming that LE are going after smalltime hosting

Could be useful to have a tool similar to https://git.0x0.st/mia/0x0#moderation-ui

Tangential, how heavy is a NSFW classifier for a VPS? This link leads to a HuggingFace model with Telegram id of author offering premium model.

> how heavy is a NSFW classifier for a VPS?

Not heavy at all, they're really tiny in the grand scale of things and can easily run on CPU only unless you're wanna classify 100s of items per second.

Good question.

Right now we run some ML models to check for illegal content and then respond immediately with the ban hammer.

We also monitor content published on our platform with some admin tools we built.

And that's why no one can offer this sustainably for $2/month. There is a cost of policing for illegal stuff as well as outright terrible stuff that requires fair bit of effort.

You can even get full 'root' on a virtual machine for that price, and plenty of webhosting options.

https://lowendbox.com/blog/2-usd-vps-cheap-vps-under-2-month...

For many years now I've been hosting my IRC bouncer on a $13/yr VPS at netcup and it has been more stable than some of my other VPSes.

Granted, the market for shared hosting has settled closer to $6, but OVH, Hetzner and Netcup all still offer shared hosting for $2/month, with a free domain on top. And all three are in this market for ages now. They limit you to static pages, PHP and a MySQL database, but you can do plenty of illegal stuff with that.

Wait till they get popular, and then they will abandon this.

I'm not sure about netcup, but Hetzner and OVH are very large, very popular hosting providers that have been in this game for decades.

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