Hi all,
I would strongly suggest Hong Kong as China mainland will be filtered behind the chinese
firewall. If we do encrypted traffic (ssh, ssl, vpn) the authorities could become interested
and start to ask stupid questions and may want to have back doors and private keys.
I hate such stuff and just want to operate an encrypted development server that has
all the freedom it deserves where we can put all our stuff without needing to ask someone,
if we may do so or even worse would need to do self censorship.
Europe is not free, it is infested with greedy lawyers and politicians who happen to
be lawyers in most cases at least in germany.
Dont host in germany, not in the EU and also not in the USA (you know why some
stuff of the openbsd project is hosted in canada ;-) crypto is a weapon, AES shirts were
forbidden to be exported from the US)
Look for hosting in Hong Kong and if you like and if you have decent internet you
can also host at home / fab or university or a place like that.
I am sure that one can buy used servers by DELL, HP or even some Chinese
brand (US computers may / do have back doors in management interface.
Never ever connect the management interface HPILO or DELL DARC and
all the other shit like that (remote console over ethernet with virtual floppy/cdrom
mounter) to the internet. Have a hardware (separate box, with two separate NICs,
may be an openwrt router 2NICS!) VPN router if you really need to connect the
remote admin interface. Have no way to route traffic from that VPN to/from the
internet. The VPN is only a reserved net like
10.0.0.0/28
I would suggest to buy something used some standard 2U server with 3.5 inch
HDDs and put 2 HDDs and have raid1 with the linux kernel this is a stable
and simple solution. Never trust a raid controller and its firmware, as
when the controller is gone, your data is gone.
Have much fun,
Ludwig