Ablative was originally built to fight certain clauses of the United Kingdom's Digital Economy Act. Those clauses never came to be but Ablative lived on as the webhost that I would want to use; A webhost that not only protects your privacy at every step (by how you sign up, how you pay and how you communicate) but would also standup to spurious take down requests.
As we've grown more popular with folks who want to speak truth to power, host their blog or just for folks who want to experiment with .onion technology we've also seen increases in abuse of our services.
Between COVID restrictions on access to the datacenters, the crypto crash affecting our finances and our tiny team spending more time fending off Lawyers and Law Enforcement than writing code we are trying to work out where we fit.
The true power of .onion technology is that you and you alone control your keys, you can host your content without anyone being able to turn it off or shut you down. One only needs to look at products such as Cwtch.im, Bisq and OnionShare to see how powerful this can be.
In the worst case Ablative makes .onion hosting as fragile as any other web hosting product.
As of today (9th August 2022) I am putting a hold on new signups for any product whilst we decide how best to contribute to the ecosystem.
Yes. Billing is also paused for QuadHop, MultiHop and SingleHop customers.
I (gareth@ablative.hosting) have enjoyed being able to run the sort of web host I would want to be a customer of but I need to balance that with what is best for the .onion ecosystem, for customers and for anyone who is relying on the product Ablative offers.
I want Ablative to come back from this pause stronger than ever but it needs to be offering the right product.
The current plans are either to finish our long delayed .onion VPS offering and/or freemium .onion only web hosting.
.onion only VPS' would consist of small VMs which are only accessible via .onion. Customers would have a root shell and can configure the service however they like.
Freemium .onion webhosting would be similar to our Shared Single Hop Service with 100Mb of static web hosting for free on a subdomain. Additional features (PHP/MySQL, more disk space, dedicated .onion etc) would require payment.
Yes but this remains a bespoke setup and comes with a hefty price tag.
We do not currently offer phone support.