We will assume you are using Cloudflare and DigitalOcean. We advise against using AWS, they charge for an IP address. (They charge out the ass for absolutely everything.)
We like CloudFlare because they are good at fighting robots, and offer a varety of very useful services with one click, have very cheap content hosting, and don’t charge for outbound bandwidth. We like DigitalOCean because they are reasonably affordable, and not Amazon (AWS), Google (Google Cloud), or Microsoft (Azure).
Warning: Cloudflare is one of the companies that knows the most about you on the internet, comparable to Google or your ISP. This is part of how the robot fighting works, but all connections on the open internet are under surveillance. Be extremely careful. We will not be routing through them.
(Coming soon: Just get through Cloudflare)
The name and address information needed for registration is not checked by Cloudflare, and enforcement is not proactive. All routine communication will occur via email address, physical address information will only become important in a court of law.
While not a true common carrier, Cloudflare does position themselves as neutral transport: Their incentives as a low-level network service mean they do not want to pivot to any kind of active content moderation. While they do have a terms of service, these terms are much closer in spirit to “we will act if forced to”, not “we don’t want content on our network that makes us look bad.”
Cloudflare has also shown incredible spine defending this attitude from pressure campaigns and vague “this is harmful” complaints. As an example, in 2022 Cloudflare went to the mat to continue providing service to Kiwi Farms, some of the worst people on the internet, despite an enormous public pressure campaign. While they eventually relented, their statement is a good summary of their attitude:
This is about the best you can get on the public internet.This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare’s role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with. However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.