An American company steps up to fight Big Tech censorship

Most of the websites and online services you count on depend on cloud service providers for hosting, like the wildly popular Amazon Web Services. However, as the culture war has heated up, these services have become increasingly political. AWS effectively killed Parler on January 10, 2021, when it cut the right-leaning social network’s hosting. For a website to exist, it needs to be hosted by a provider. This reality has meant websites with wrongthink can be kicked off the internet until they can find a company to host them.

If we are to have any hope of countering this trend and returning to a truly neutral net, we need new companies to provide those basic services and challenge quasi-monopolies like Amazon. American Cloud is one such company that is taking on AWS head-on.

When AWS shut down Parler, American Cloud CEO and co-founder Aron Wagner saw an opportunity to serve organizations that incumbent cloud providers rejected for philosophical reasons, like firearm companies, alternative health services, and certain online ministries. He believed that he could provide those services for a fraction of the cost.

“We're passionate about providing reliable digital infrastructure. We're trying to make that as easy as possible and as accessible as possible for any U.S.-based business,” Wagner said.

“We need to be focused on that and making sure that it’s effectively a utility for a customer to be able to grow and scale their business, and not about virtue-signaling or answering DEI or ESG,” Wagner added.

I asked Wagner why he thinks so many companies have become increasingly political, even when it seems to threaten their core business. Wagner thinks it’s a combination of pressure from stockholders and other customers.

“After Parler got kicked out of AWS, some infrastructure providers were unwilling to service them, because they were worried about their customers backlashing against it. And so they felt handcuffed by who they were already providing service to,” Wagner said.

And how does American Cloud plan to avoid being stuck in a similar situation?

“We're just very upfront about it in the beginning. As long as it's legal commerce, we're here to support it, even if we disagree with it,” Wagner said.

A highly prepared cloud provider

But how does American Cloud keep itself and its 72,000-square-foot foot data center from being canceled by the services it relies upon?

“We own the security perimeter, we own the land, we own the building, we own all the gear inside of the building — all the power, cooling, networking, and servers,” Wagner said. Additionally, American Cloud has contracts with over a dozen Tier 1 network providers, so if one were to cut off the company, it has plenty of backup internet connections. And even if all of those cut ties, American Cloud owns dark fiber that it could use to create its own backbone.

“From an outside threat perspective, power utilities are probably a bigger threat than bandwidth providers,” Wagner said. And even in that case, the company is prepared to run the data center entirely on diesel if it comes to it.

“If the utility provider were to cut off power to the data center, I think our country would be in a much worse position than we think it is today,” Wagner said.

Wagner’s background in the United States Army helped give him that preparedness mindset. He served as a Ranger in the 82nd Airborne, where he participated in Operation Inherent Resolve, fighting ISIS in Iraq. He had planned to transition into special forces, but he was prevented from doing so for medical reasons.

“I was honestly planning on being a lifer,” Wagner said. “It was an extremely rewarding experience, but it wasn't my goal to be in what we'd call the Big Army.”

Near the end of his Army tenure, Wagner signed up for the DOD SkillBridge program, in which soldiers get to intern at a company for four months while still on active duty. He landed at a data center consultancy firm in Raleigh, North Carolina. “I really fell in love with the physical side of digital infrastructure and the internet,” Wagner said.

American Cloud for all

Wagner emphasized that American Cloud isn’t a purely ideological company. Unlike some others in this space, which compensate for mediocre pricing or a poor customer experience by targeting an underserved niche, American Cloud aims to offer better service at a better price point.

“Our target audience is really U.S.-based businesses, and it doesn't have to only be industries that have been underserved by the other cloud providers,” Wager said.

Wagner said that businesses looking to transition from AWS to American Cloud can expect to cut their bill by about 25%, and AC has saved some customers 70%-80%.

“These are non-political, non-controversial companies; they're just looking for better bang for their buck at the end of the day,” Wagner said.

I found it surprising that American Cloud doesn’t yet accept cryptocurrency payments, but Wagner assured me that it’s coming later this year.

So if your business needs cloud hosting or you’d like to explore an alternative to AWS and other tech giants, check out American Cloud and see if it’s a good fit for you.

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