> what if they unilaterally decide one day that our business is politically unacceptable because a bad person says nice things about us?
HN is extremely ignorant on such matters. But the truth is every hosting provider in the world does this in one way or another, as they all belong to some jurisdiction with some people, organizations, governments having power over them, being able to pressure them, etc. You always had to think about it, just some of us for some services in some countries more so and earlier.
Luckily on the tech side and organizational side it's not that hard to protect your service from such primitive soft-power censorship attempts. Torrent sites, political websites, vpn, tor, proxy services, porn, darkweb have been doing this for years very successfully. You just need to be careful about jurisdictions you choose for your domains, registrars, hosting providers and you have to separate hosting providers for internet facing servers from the hosting providers for the backend infrastructure, then host internet facing servers in a bunch of different countries with dns failover and some automated setup of new servers to be able to quickly and painlessly switch and try providers. Obviously backend hosting providers shouldn't be able to deduce what you are hosting there at all and it should at least be hard to deduce for frontend ones, have some decoy stuff ready in case they ask, but encrypt everything, encrypt communications with backends, use proxies or even tor if paranoid they can deduce what you are hosting by IPs you are tunneling to, etc. This way you can even keep using AWS for most things without giving AWS power to boot you, just not for internet facing stuff. And once someone boots you from one of your frontend providers - you just switch to a new one in another country.
It's all very benchmark-chasing theoretical. In practice performance is more complicated and mmap is this weird corner-case over engineered inconsistent optimization thing that often wastes or even "leaks" memory which can be used for actually important for performance caches, it's also awful at error handling and so on. I had to literally patch LevelDB to disable mmap on amd64 once, which eliminated OOMs on those servers, allowed me to run way more LevelDB instances and overall improved performance so significantly, that I had to write this comment.