Registry and name server services are both available at Epik, but they differ in important ways. (I assume you know all this, but for anyone confused by all the recent tech jargon, I’ll try to demystify, if I can.)

Registrar service is administrative, recording the contacts for various roles, expiration dates, renewals dates, and the like. It’s really just a record-keeping function. Every year, you renew your domain names, just like the registration on your vehicles.

Name servers handle the actual work of translating a domain name lookup into an IP address. This is a critical function in the cloud age, because many services have no fixed IP, or the service endpoints themselves are distributed, and so on. The lookup has to be fast and accurate, or the delays will feel annoying to the end user. Also, because this function is the first touchpoint for accessing a service, it is a good place to put some software that can detect DDoS and other malicious attacks like AI attacks. Cloudflare and others provide this service. That’s why you see all the boats and bicycles: the web application firewall is protecting the site.

Cloudflare is tolerant of political speech, but not perfectly so. They gave TDW a warning that was stickied a few days ago. Epik seems to be a bit more tolerant. But they also live in the ecosystem, so if they run afoul of Amazon or Google’s ideology, they may be deplatformed themselves.

What a tangled web.

And host email's too. Something to consider when degoogling.

GoDaddy is one of the worst. They pretty much broke the ice of registrars engaging in censorship and were one of the first partners to dump Gab.

I know for a long time Namecheap was pretty respected, but that rep is pretty old in my head so I'm not really sure how they are nowadays. Epik appears to have hosting options on their site looking at it though, so probably just explore that.

If the sites are non-political, you’re safe almost anywhere. I had become a big fan of digitalocean for their simplicity, developer support, performance, and pricing. And then they dropped this bullshit: https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/digitaloceans-position-on-parler/

While DigitalOcean is committed to supporting a free and open internet, based on the history of the content on Parler, their platform would be in violation of our terms of service and they are not welcome on DigitalOcean.

The search continues.

Didn't GoDaddy just remove the website ar15.com from their services?