John Matze, a software engineer who was Parler’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said earlier this month that Ms. Mercer effectively fired him because of a disagreement over running the website. Ms. Mercer hired Mark Meckler, a leading voice in the tea party movement, to replace Mr. Matze.
Prior to the website’s return on Monday, Parler executives said they would be rejected by several web hosting companies who feared either a PR backlash or a cyberattack if they agreed to endorse the site.
Internet infrastructure expert Doug Madory said data behind Parler’s website showed they were connected to a company in Ohio called CloudRoute and a Los Angeles company called SkySilk. CloudRoute’s executive director Andre Temnorod said in an interview that his company was only included in this data because it sold technology to SkySilk, a web hosting provider. “SkySilk is our customer and Parler is SkySilk’s customer,” he said. SkySilk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
About a week after Parler went offline, Parler set up a simple website for people who tried to visit their social network with simple messages. and Senator Rand Paul, Republican from Kentucky.
That site, so simple it could be hosted from a single laptop, still required cybersecurity protection to stay online, partly because Parler was attacked by internet guards who believe it had a role in the Have played riots in the Capitol.
To stay online, Parler got help from DDoS-Guard, a Russian company that has expressed concerns to some internet researchers that the Russian government might be monitoring Parler users. Parler also worked with Epik, a Seattle company, on domain registration, a basic service on the Internet. Epik has helped support other fringe sites that have lost support from other companies, including the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site.
Mr. Matze founded Parler with a fellow programmer outside of Las Vegas in 2018 to fuel the growing dissatisfaction with Silicon Valley, especially among the far right, who felt increasingly restricted to mainstream social networks because of the actions of Facebook and Twitter about hate speech, threats and misinformation.
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