9600 baud?!? Downright speedy....my 1st modem was 300 baud. Worked OK on “all text” dial-up BBS’s!
I am still gonna say that Microsoft Azure or AWS would be a better solution for FR...would free up John for software tweeking, and both of those would be more robust against DDOS attacks.
Likewise. It was the late eighties. I was a mainframe jockey, when I latched onto a TI Silent 700, which was an acoustically coupled modem (300 baud) married to a thermal printer / keyboard. It was amazing. One BBS lead to another. Until you ran out of thermal paper.
You dialed the number and stuck the handset into the rubber cups (Mommy, what's a handset?).
Oh, that wasn't my FIRST modem; it was just the one I had when I switched from CompuServe to plain ISP service with a local outfit. Prior to that I had 300 starting in the late 70's, 1200 in the early 80's, and 2400 until about 1992.
Given FR's political position and content, I don't think any of the commercial outfits are a safe haven. My personal favorite is Amazon for my business and personal "cloud" VMs, but Frankly I wouldn't trust anything run by leftists.
Akamai might be the best choice. They're pricey, but they're the outfit that the other big guys go to for ultra-reliable distributed service -- even Microsoft has hosted some of their own stuff on Akamai (like Windows Updates).