Wow, they can't figure out how to colocate a server? There are plenty of companies that would love to be the hosting face of Parler and agree with its userbase.
I know a variety of websites that operate on the level of petabytes a month that are similar to parler (4chan), or are big hosters of files that directly infringe many peoples copyright.
Parler isn't even half bad compared to some of the hosted content on the rest of the clearnet.
The reason this is possible is because of 1. Cloudflare for media content and 2. Colocation for everything else. I don't know of an instance of a T1 or T2 data center "deplatforming" any servers that weren't directly operating illigally and had to be told it was illigal by law enforcement.
Perhaps individual companies that you contract with to get that data centers internet line, sure, but again there's plenty of companies that don't care who you are and/or like parler. I know of one in New York that offers very affordable pricing.
No colo is going to touch them, because if they did whatever other existing business they had would leave. Which of course, is the real reason AWS turfed them, and no other cloud provider will pick them up.
Not even Oracle, who are desperate for any cloud attention and were buddy buddy with Trump are taking Parler's calls.
Oracle's more correctly buddy buddy with the US government, so obviously they ain't inclined to be welcoming of people who tried to interfere with said government.
I have a hard time this is their actual needs in terms of servers - their video ingest pipeline sounded like it was just throwing videos on s3, and it didn't look like they were doing any transcoding at all (plus not removing photo or video metadata). 73tb of ram for distributed pgsql also sounds excessive.
"Immediately before AWS shut down all online services, Parler had over 15 million accounts and approximately 1 million new downloads of its app per day."
My interpretation is that they didn't have the time or the staff to fix the scalability bottlenecks in the site.
"As a final matter, multiple members of Parler’s team have come to me expressing both fear for their career and fear for their lives and potentially bodily harm due to the press surrounding AWS’s claims. Many employees want to resign due to the strain and pressure they feel, fearing hostility towards our company and fearing for their own safety. Some have had articles written about them. Many are being harassed by reporters and journalists already. Some have had to cancel their phone numbers, and their family members’ phone numbers, due to harassment."
My guess is that most of Parler's technical staff are either in hiding or have quit. They have 15 million user accounts; I'm sure some of them are irate about their posts and metadata being publicly available. They're also facing harassment from the left but that's harder to quantify.
Just to be clear, I'm not endorsing harassment of Parler employees, AWS employees, or anyone else.
This list is ridiculous. It's probably someone entering a wishlist on a calculator to check the price (or a wildly optimistic 5 year forecast) vs actual requirements.
