> Imagine if there was an API to rent servers within minutes or someday even seconds.

Imagine if everyone offering said API were capricious, inhumane, and uncaring about customer support, service terminations, and customer wind-down processes.

Now that you’ve pictured AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean, et al. more fully, that rules them out as available options for a long-term fanfic-centric erotica archive site that has specific and unusual legal concerns and threats to its existence incompatible with skittish Redbox-style compute providers.

Was there a particular cloud provider you were thinking of, that is not a ‘good night, sleep well, perhaps we’ll kill you in the morning’ service provider incompatible with AO3?

That speed comes with its own cost though. Might be simply too unreasonable at their scale.