Meet the New Hosting Advocates Protecting Websites from Unjust Takedowns

TL; DR: We all have the right to free speech — even if it’s on the internet. Patmos’s recent acquisition of Joe’s Datacenter means small businesses can now get web hosting that focuses on freedom as a service. We talked with the Founder of Joe’s Datacenter and Chief Infrastructure Officer at Patmos, Joe Morgan, about how Patmos’s acquisition of Joe’s Datacenter allows Patmos to provide freedom-focused cloud, VPS, and bare metal hosting. Having known the Patmos team for several years, Joe saw the potential in making freedom-as-a-service a bigger reality for more SMBs.

Even if you don’t know the details of its government, most of us are familiar with North Korea’s totalitarian regime. To us outsiders, it’s hard not to think of it as a prison — but it’s not the only country with strict control over its citizens.

China is home to not only the Great Wall but also the Great Firewall. The Great Firewall is an internet censorship system implemented to block dozens of Western websites, including Instagram, Reddit, Google, and YouTube.

The U.S. isn’t immune, either. Take the WikiLeaks controversy, for instance. In 2010, when a user published classified government text exchanges on WikiLeaks, an anonymous whistleblowing platform that Deep Throat, the main news source in the Watergate scandal, would’ve loved, its hosting provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), shut the site down and dropped it as a client.

It’s challenges like these that IT solutions provider Patmos wants to prevent. To do that, it needs complete control of its infrastructure — including the network, hardware, and facilities. And it needs to reduce reliance on third-party providers.

That’s why Patmos acquired Joe’s Datacenter in 2023. Joe’s Datacenter is an independent provider that offers affordable and reliable data center solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). It provides a fully controlled cloud infrastructure, bare metal dedicated servers, colocation services, and VPS hosting.

When Patmos approached Joe’s Datacenter about the investment, its Founder and CEO, Joe Morgan, was immediately interested.

“They had customers who felt they were at risk of being canceled due to political, religious, or other controversial viewpoints and needed a hosting provider that could offer true security,” he explained. “So we’re one of the few data centers that can confidently say, ‘You can’t be canceled.’”

Joe founded Joe’s Datacenter in 2008. From the beginning, his goal was to provide affordable, secure, and reliable data center services to SMBs.

Today, Patmos owns and operates the facility in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, with other data centers in Phoenix and Dallas and colocation services in Fremont and New York.

(Quick tip: You can take a virtual tour or schedule an in-person tour to get a closer look at the facilities. At its home base in Kansas City, the company also has private dedicated server rooms and colocation server rooms.)

Let’s get into the thick of what Joe’s Datacenter offers:

• Cloud Hosting
  • Public Cloud: This all-in-one system makes managing cloud services easier and more affordable. There’s also a handy public cloud price calculator that gives you the exact monthly, daily, and hourly rates. The lowest price starts at $11 per month.
  • Private Cloud: Want something more secure and customizable that’s hosted on-premises? Pay for the hardware with custom-built clusters (for example, three nodes with 48 cores are ideal for building lower-scale generative AI models). Prices range from $900 to $1,500 per month.
• VPS Hosting: Whether you need Linux or Windows, you can customize your package how you want and only pay for what you need. Both services are built in Joe’s Datacenter’s public cloud with fast enterprise-level SSD storage, ranging from $9.50 to $19.50 per month.
• Bare Metal Dedicated Servers: With dozens of processor types to choose from, you’ll get free reboots, free setup within 24-48 hours, free OS reloads, hardware testing, and 24/7 support. Prices are among the most affordable we’ve seen, ranging from $35 to $72 per month. (Plus, you can see exactly how many servers are available for purchase, so there’s no guessing game.)
• Colocation Services: Joe’s has six colocation options to choose from, including mid-tower, designated rack space, and full cabinet. All run on a 1 Gbps network, 33TB transfer (which can accommodate millions of web page views and thousands of hours of video streaming), and you get five unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for better security. Prices range from $55 to $1,350 per month.

Cybersecurity is an important offset, too. I’ve talked about cyberattackers before, and I say the same thing every time: Just as our tech gets smarter, so do cyberattackers.

That’s why Joe’s Datacenter offers cybersecurity services using machine learning (ML) to detect and stop cyber threats. Its services include antimalware, antiransomware, URL filtering, backups, and data recovery.

Patmos is dedicated to protecting client privacy and staying reliable. In fact, they’ve gone so far as to create a “Hosting Bill of Rights” that they guarantee to each and every customer.

“We guarantee that we will host your site in a way that prevents cancellations,” Joe explained. “It’s like a reverse terms of service — these are the rights we guarantee you when you host with us.”

Here’s what Patmos promises when you choose to host with them:

1. Technology Serving Humans: Technology should exist to enhance our lives and capabilities.
2. Decentralization and Democratization of the Internet: A decentralized internet spreads power and control across many players, not just a few big corporations. That’s why Patmos has strong peering partnerships, so it’s not dependent on one internet provider and fully controls its data centers.
3. Security and Privacy for Customers: Customer data is not just secure but also intentionally protected, even in the face of a subpoena. Joe captured this well when he said, “When a service is free, you’re the commodity.”
4. Avoid Consolidation with Big Tech Companies: Don’t get locked into a big provider like Google or AWS just because they’re well-known. Plus, smaller companies usually offer better personalized service.

All of this background information leads us to the acquisition of Joe’s Datacenter by Patmos. While we briefly touched on Patmos earlier, it’s time to get the fuller picture.

Patmos is a tech company that specializes in providing “cancel-resistant” hosting and IT solutions. But what is “cancel-resistant” hosting, you ask?

It’s a type of web hosting that keeps websites and online content safe from being taken down or censored, whether it’s content regarding politics, social issues, or other sensitive topics (that are unrelated to illegal activities).

Twitter is an excellent example of this. The social media platform has faced plenty of criticism for censoring political and social content. For instance, in 2021, Twitter permanently banned President Trump’s account.

To me, this kind of decision only highlights the importance of freedom of speech. For a universally used platform that is meant to be a space for open expression and community, it does seem a little backward to ban certain ideologies, whether or not we personally agree with them.

“The mission and vision of Patmos have remained the same: providing a safe haven for hosting, as long as it’s legal,” said Joe.

In essence, cancel-resistant hosting guarantees that your content remains online and accessible, even if there are attempts to remove it.

That’s why Patmos delivers custom solutions that prioritize security, privacy, and freedom-as-a-service while avoiding complete reliance on big tech monopolies.

And now, Joe’s Datacenter is one of three Patmos-owned and operated data centers to provide the vital infrastructure for these services.

As for what’s next, Joe shared that Patmos is planning to build a new 20 megawatt facility explicitly designed for AI tasks.

It’ll handle high-performance computing needs. Think of things like training deep learning models, performing predictive analytics, and running advanced technologies like computer vision (for example, taking a picture of an object and getting immediate information about it).

The goal is to have complete control over the data center, which Joe describes as owning it “to the dirt.”

“Even though AI isn’t our main focus, we’re aiming to own our buildings and data centers completely,” he explained. “Currently, 83-87% of the internet is hosted by hyper scalers like AWS, Azure, and Google. These giants dominate the infrastructure market, but they don’t offer easy peering options — you have to pay to connect with them.”

With Patmos’s mission and Joe’s Datacenter’s infrastructure, you get a reliable and trustworthy hosting advocate. Take a virtual tour before choosing your plan, or contact the team personally for more information.