No, no, and NO.
AO3 does not live in âthe cloudâ because that is other peopleâs computers, and other peopleâs computers are vulnerable to censorship.
AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but itâs a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going âBadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!â
Owning the servers is a core tenet of OTW/AO3.
Warming up a new database serverâŠ.
When people involved with AO3 talk about âthe cost of serversâ they donât mean âthe cost to pay Amazon for space on their servers.â They mean, like, the cost to physically own them, and eventually replace them with new ones. And the operating costs to run them.
AO3 is not âin the cloud.â AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.
While this is not a solution that can work for everyone who wants to deal with controversial content, it is why AO3ple sneer at alt-righters who complain about getting thrown off hosting platforms.
I Want Us to Own the Goddamned Servers
Because I want us to own the goddamned servers, ok? Because I want a place where we canât be TOSed and where no one can turn the lights off or try to dictate to us what kind of stories we can tell each other.
AO3 is what a website looks like when you seize the means of production.





















