Why Passage of SESTA/FOSTA is Leading Some Cloud Providers to Terminate Users (Tech Republic)

Read the full article by James Sanders at TechRepublic.com

One of the disadvantages of cloud computing—particularly with user-facing services, less so with infrastructure services like AWS—is the ease with which users of these services can be dumped. Depending on the service, there may be little to no recourse or means of appeal. While some account terminations are certainly justified, ones that are not can cause significant headaches for users when services do not work as expected or when they lose access to data.

This is what happened to the non-profit crowdfunding website Liberapay, which operated a small blog with "a handful of posts" detailing the operations of the website since it launched in May 2016. According to Liberapay, Medium had suspended the account and blocked access to already-published stories "with only 12 hours notice." Liberapay claims that Medium blocked access due to writing about cryptocurrencies, though they claim that no post they made is about cryptocurrency at all.

Fortunately, even under suspension, Liberapay was still able to access their Medium account in order to export the posts. In an email to TechRepublic, the cofounder of Liberapay noted that the account "looked perfectly normal, there wasn't even a message about it being suspended." Liberapay had appealed the suspension to Medium support, and the blog was reinstated after six hours. 

James Sanders is a Java programmer specializing in software as a service and thin client design, and virtualizing legacy programs for modern hardware.