I think most of the people who are saying it's easy to set up bare metal hosting for Parler are severely underestimating the difficulty of hosting Parler
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Spinning up any “bare metal” service in a week is a challenge, unless your idea of that is a VPS or managed server solution. Even in the case of the latter having gone through two companies hosted on RackSpace I think a week long timetable for a site like Parler is pretty short
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I'd also be surprised if they were using AWS in a way that their code remained easily portable to other providers.
Perhaps they really were keeping it portable, but I find AWS an odd choice in that case. From my perspective the whole point of AWS is to build with their APIs.
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I don't see how else you store 80TB+ of data on AWS without using S3.
Perhaps they built in abstractions for using other S3-like stores, but if they're going "bare metal", what are they going to do? Deploy something like Ceph or Minio on top of 80TB self-managed disks?
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Yeah, exactly. Since they were using AWS, I assume they were using assorted AWS APIs. They can't simply self-host their services and have it working again. There's a lot more involved than simply setting up some servers with standard services. They need a bunch of development.
If I was building that kind of large platform, I'd want to do it on top of something that I could self-host. Thankfully, I don't work on anything like that and have no plans for it. The kinds of services we need are all static file servers or services without cross-account data.
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I don't think they ever seriously considered that it would be difficult to find hosting. Hosting user-generated content with nearly non-existent moderation is enough to make that a problem even without going out of the way to attract the audience that they brought over to it.
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