Interview with CEO of SkySilk, the hosting company that helped bring Parler online, who says he did it to spite tech giants like Amazon who abuse their might
On Jan. 10, just days after pro-Trump rioters blitzed the U.S. Capitol, Amazon Web Services pulled the plug on the conservative social media site Parler. Tweets: @davetroy , @jimstinnett , @tompalmsprings , @gelliebeans1 , @rojawi , @davidfolkenflik , @npr , @bobbyallyn , and @tundrawolfqueen Tweets: Dave Troy / @davetroy : “It's not a shell company” is totally what you want to hear when someone is trying to convince you of a firm's legitimacy. @digitalocean @linode listen up these guys have next-level marketing ideas🔥 https://twitter.com/... El Kabong / @jimstinnett : #Skysilk is like K-Y Jelly for Propaganda and #DomesticTerrorists They provide breeding dens for Mindfucking Racist Brainwashing Experts to bake Hate into the Internet. It's not Free Speech if it's a Weapon used against Truth. @MarkTLive @RichardHourula https://www.npr.org/... Tom Andrew / @tompalmsprings : Parler had relied on Amazon's web hosting services to reach its burgeoning audience of more than 12 million. After Amazon cut it off, it was rejected by six other web hosts. It seemed doomed to disappear from the web. Until SkySilk showed up. https://www.npr.org/... Gelliebeans / @gelliebeans1 : Skysilk and companies like Epik owned by Monster are able to save controversial sites like, “Daily Stormer”&"Parler" so the haters have a place to foment their hate while others lurk and get ideas. #business https://www.npr.org/... @rojawi : Sketchy web-hosting business will take on anyone as a client, even Parler. CEO says he really hates “Big Tech” and wants to retire early so he can do film projects. https://www.npr.org/... David Folkenflik / @davidfolkenflik : “One early employee said SkySilk was losing tens of thousands of dollars every month and the reason for its existence at all was murky.” @BobbyAllyn on the company that stepped in to save Parler https://twitter.com/... @npr : Last month, an obscure company called SkySilk brought Parler back online — after Amazon pulled the plug over violent and hateful posts that Parler allegedly refused to take down. Here's what we know about the company. https://www.npr.org/... Bobby Allyn / @bobbyallyn : This obscure web hosting firm SkySilk saved Parler. I dug into the company, interviewed former employees who are confounded and unsettled by the “sketchy” business. I went to LA to interview the SkySilk CEO. He told me: “It's not a shell company” https://www.npr.org/... @tundrawolfqueen : Parler is a true threat to our democracy. Amazon was right to pull it & it needs to be kept OFF social media period! It's just loaded w/racists & white supremists who will just most likely cont usin it to create more disturbance & treason. 📌 https://www.npr.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
After the argument that Parler's outage was a market decision rather than one company's veto, NPR's interview with SkySilk's CEO puts a face on the counter-position: a small host that picked up Parler after AWS cut it off on Jan. 10, motivated explicitly by hostility to Amazon's market power rather than by the platform's business case. The interview lands alongside awkward disclosures — an early employee says SkySilk was losing tens of thousands of dollars a month, and the CEO felt forced to deny it was a shell company.
The arc matters because Parler's answer to infrastructure dependence was to stop renting it: the company later restructured as Parlement Technologies and, per its $16M Series B and Dynascale acquisition, began selling 'uncancelable' cloud services itself — a pivot from tenant to landlord.
First-order effects
- SkySilk is now hosting Parler at a direct loss — tens of thousands of dollars per month per its own early employee — while absorbing criticism that it enables extremist sites, a reputational cost its CEO is betting against Amazon's unpopularity.
Second-order effects
- AWS's termination showed deplatformed platforms that any single host is a chokepoint, and Parler's move into 'uncancelable' cloud services via Dynascale is the competitive response: infrastructure itself becomes a differentiator marketed to other online businesses.
Third-order effects
- If moderation pressure keeps pushing contested platforms down the stack, the durable pattern is vertical integration around hosting — gatekeeper leverage shifting from the app-store and social layer to whoever owns the servers, with small hosts like SkySilk either subsidizing ideology or selling the 'uncancelable' pitch as a product.
The trend: Content-moderation disputes are migrating from social platforms down to the cloud infrastructure layer, where 'uncancelable' hosting is emerging as both an ideology and a product category.