Startups Stack Exchange Archive

Non American IT Companies Allowing Free Expression

One of my startup proposals was rejected by an investor for the reason that we may lose support from American IT companies. From what I’ve read, VoatCo has also had a problem where people got angry at them and decided to convince the company hosting them to eliminate them (look it up; Voat had to migrate). I realize this is a concern and it’s one reason that I’m planning to start a business outside of the US, but originally was planning to host the services through Microsoft or Amazon (both US companies).

But this isn’t making my investor easy and she’s wanting a non-American IT company. Do any foreign IT companies have a reputation for respecting and upholding free expression in the startup community?

Answer 5596

If being out of reach of 1st-world countries counts, and if I may recommend my own host, try hub.org. It’s FreeBSD-based rather than Linux, and the site and the control panel are minimalist, but it’s based in Panama and run by Marc Fournier.

Panama offers free speech as long as you’re not doing anything outright dumb (e.g. child porn).

And Marc, who I know personally, is one of the original four behind Postgres. He’s an awesome chap who is as proactive and experienced as system admins can get.

In stark contrast to every host I had run into until I switched in 2005 or since through clients, I’ve yet to throw a problem at him that he didn’t solve in just about no time. Need NDB set up? Done. Need pg_shard? Done. Some bizarre multi-VPS setup? Done. Site’s down for some weird reason you can’t figure out? He’ll find what’s wrong in no time.

That’s truly where he shines, in fact. He’s able to liaise with his clients’ dev teams to plan ahead and do proactive system administration, rather than (semi-)reactive work when things are down (which is basically what all other hosts do in practice).

Anyway, I hope that didn’t sound too sales’y – it’s not meant that way, and again, he’s a buddy. But I sincerely cannot recommend hub.org strongly enough.


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