[ADVICE] Tips on creating a small website just to host links to pirated content I've translated

Lloyd@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 173 points –

I want to build a "pirate portfolio" of all my personal fan works. There's manga, anime, documentaries, book chapters, all sorts of things I've translated myself from Russian and English. Mostly Japanese, British and modern Russian content. No USA.

What do you guys think would be the best place to host the website? Not the content itself, which I plan on uploading to mega until I can afford to build a small home server.

I live in a "pirate-friendly" country (Brazil), but it won't make any difference if the website platform itself is located in a regulated country, am I right? They can have it taken down anyway.

I'm thinking of nothing special, even a simple rentry page, minimally customized, would do.

So, what do you guys think I should do to protect my website from being randomly taken down? How to post the links? Where to host the websites? Thanks!

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If I were doing this and lived in a country that’s not hostile to piracy, I’d look up webhosting providers in my country. I’d then learn a little HTML and CSS at https://www.w3schools.com/html/ and just write pages in Notepad++ and upload them to the server.

If my host dumped me, it would be ridiculously simple to re-upload the files to a new host.

Good to know there's a way to keep an easy re-uploadable backup in case the site goes down. I hadn't thought about learning some HTML and CSS, thanks for the tip!

You do not need to learn Html & css (ofc you can if you want to). You can find a template for a simple blog on github and deploy it to your server.

i host my site on BlueHost with WordPress because it's fairly cheap, easy, no set up (WordPress pre installed).

You do have to know how to use WordPress (not any harder than using Excel, really).

I've been developing for WP for over a decade and I'm just blown away when a grandma who can't use her phone for some reason knows how to use WordPress.

yeah, I mean if you're writing your own plug-ins/ multi level menus / themes from scratch it gets a tad more complicated (but really not much more than variable = data_for_variable and if x then y) but really it's just a file system with posts instead of files.

You could use a static site generator (like Hugo or Zola), then you could stick the site wherever you want, from GitHub pages to local website hosters. Another interesting option would be putting it on Tor or i2p. You can setup those programs to host your website on your computer easily.

If you want to do this for free, you could always use a dynamic DNS provider like NO-IP or DuckDNS to get a free hostname.

Then you can use a static site generator to generate a site and use NGINX, Traefik, or similar to create a simple web server (with a reverse proxy that uses SSL to provide HTTPS) to host the content directly from your computer.

Currently, I use this method to host a couple of services that my friends and I use, such as Kavita, qBittorrent web UI, and a simple kanban board.

I don’t know for hosting but if you want to get something running quickly Hugo has theme support:

https://gohugo.io

Otherwise you could whip up a few html pages and use tailwindcss to help make things look a little nicer.

https://tailwindcss.com

Or just do everything manually :)

Thank you so much! This will be helpful (for both my pirate and official portfolio)

Once big tech starts to monitor everyone in the west using AI, Brazil will be the place to be... :)

What do you guys think would be the best place to host the website? Not the content itself, which I plan on uploading to mega until I can afford to build a small home server.

Please do not host a website on a home server. Let alone a piracy oriented one.

Unless you have strong knowledge of cybersecurity best practices AND keep up to date AND still use some form of CDN to mitigate DDOS attacks, you are begging for your home network to be compromised and/or to be DDOS';d to oblivion (and most ISPs will be fairly cross at that point). Also, if you DO have said knowledge then you have even more reasons to never do this

I also question the wisdom of making a portfolio of all the questionably legal shit you have done since a lot of the things that make Brazil "safe" for these kinds of activity (low purchasing power and nobody gives a fuck) also makes it easy to be made an example of with no repercussions. But... you do you.

If you prevent search engines from crawling your site via robots.txt and use cloudflare free and a DMCA-ignored host (just search it) you'll be fine. Don't use a .com domain, use .ph .md .is .today, stick with the domains archive.today uses and you'll be good. If you ever get kicked off of cloudflare, just point your DNS back towards your host.

You can create a simple static website and deploy it to Vercel for free. You can buy a domain name and attach it pretty easily, but it's not needed (by default website will have .vercel.app domain).

Vercel will have something against piracy oriented website I guess

Hmm yes maybe. I do remember a paywall bypass extension was removed from there because publishers were complaining to Vercel. Worst case scenario I guess your website gets taken down