Reddit-clone Voat booted by its German webhost
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The Reddit-clone Voat announced Friday that its hosting provider shut off its servers and terminated its contract.
Voat is a Switzerland-based Reddit-like site aims to be "censorship free." It's popularity has peaked over the last two weeks, amidst a Reddit user backlash.
SEE ALSO: The Reddit revolt begins: Users push back against community crackdown
Earlier this month, Reddit banned five of its subreddits because they were being used primarily for harassment. For much of 2015, Reddit's leadership has fought to make Reddit a more inclusive place, enacting new policies and guidelines designed to curb harassment and abusive behavior.
Voat, which opened in 2014, bills itself as a "censorship-free community platform." As The Guardian and others have noted, users who are angry with Reddit's new policies have left that site for Voat. The communities banned on Reddit have reappeared on Voat.
But Voat's decision to host its servers in Germany are now causing problems with the site. After battling a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, site founder and chief technology officerAtko wrote that its German-based webhost has canceled its hosting contract because of the site's "politically incorrect" content.
On a post on Voat, Atko writes:
Our hosting provider, hosteurope.de has terminated all our contracts and shut down all our servers without issuing a warning or trying to talk to us.
Atko added that the team "managed to move our databases to a cloud platform mere hours before they shut down our servers." He also requested support from the community to help keep Voat online via contributions to its PayPal account. At the time of this writing, Anko removed the request for money, saying, "I feel we have received enough to help us survive for quite some time."
Interesting questions about freedom of speech
Voat is learning first-hand the struggles that happen when attempting to run a free-speech platform, especially if hosted overseas.
In Europe, where libel, privacy and freedom of speech laws can vary widely, much of the content on Voat could be enough to cause a webhost to break its contract with a customer.
We've seen webhosts cease hosting sites before because of content. 4chan clone 8chan has had problems finding hosting providers. Torrent aggregators such as The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents have struggled over the years to find hosting as well. The best example of a site struggling to find a webhost for its content may be WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks was kicked off of Amazon servers in 2010 after it published documents sent by Chelsea Manning.
Still, it's odd that Voat, a site founded by Europeans, would choose to host content in Germany or any other part of the EU.
Atko writes, "I don't know about you, but we are living in a weird world. We will have to carefully evaluate our long term options of providing a platform of free speech if we are to stay online."
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