What happens if Trump and his minions start cracking down of descent? What happens if Trump signs a decree limiting free speech online? What happens if the Trump Justice Department suddenly gives giants Blogspot, WordPress.com and a lot of smaller American blog hosts a list of blogs to shut down “or else?” In the short term, it does not matter if such Trump orders are actually legal, it could take months or years to litigate the legality, and in the meantime the blog host will have to comply. (The same host true for social networks but that is a different story. But, I’m talking blogs here bucko, and a blog is your soapbox to help make your voice heard.)

Solution? All this hinges on the blog host being located in the USA. If you are in America you are subject to American rules. But some blog host in Germany, Spain or Iceland are not subject to American law. They are more free to ignore such Trump decrees or even American courts. A determined Justice Department might get descenting blogs taken down, but they have to jump through extra hoops to do it.

My observation is Trump is pretty vindictive against those who get under his skin. So are his henchmen and his GOP Congress MAGA’s.

I also realized that all my blog hosts are US located.

So I went looking for fast simple to use, reasonably priced, foreign based blog hosts. Someplace one could set up a blog for free or for cheap when time matters. I narrowed it down to four companies: one already listed it’s location on it’s website, three I emailed and two replied.

Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting you abandon your US blog host. I am talking about having a place, offshore, either already set up or already checked out as a place to go to as a backup should everything start going pear shaped.

Totally Outside the USA (in no particular order):

1. Scribbles - owned by Vincent Ritter who answered right away. Scribbles is headquartered in Poland with servers in Germany. Both inside the EU so protected by country laws and EU law. I have not used Scribbles, but I have looked at a lot of blogs on Scribbles and it looks pretty complete. It’s not free but it is, IMHO, reasonably priced. It does not have a native commenting system, but Vincent has gone out of his way to make adding third party commenting fairly easy.

2. Mataroa - Mataroa is located in Germany (EU) with servers in Finland (EU). They are pretty minimalist but they do have a nice feature set. Here’s the important part, Mataroa gives you a pretty complete feature set for free and the paid tier is only $9 per year! And setting up your blog is pretty fast and easy even for a first timer. The downside is you really cannot do much customization to the look (themes etc.) which may be good, letting you focus on writing.

Half in, Half out of the USA

Bear Blog - Bear is another minimalist blog platform built by Herman Martinus, who answered my email promptly. He told me the headquarters for Bear is in South Africa but the hosting was in the US, therefore didn’t really qualify for this list. However, he followed up a few hours later saying he’d been thinking about this and he thought having the HQ outside of the US was more important than the hosting servers, because even if the servers are outside of the USA, there are third party providers like CloudFlair for DNS and many non-US hosts still end up using Amazon cloud or some other US based cloud hosting. And I tend to agree with him. So, given that, you might want to consider Bear as a host.

And I’ve looked at Bear. It has a lot available at the free tier like themes, but for a modest fee you can get more features like a newsletter, header and footer customization, enhanced stats. I also think paid allows you to add third party comments but I’m not sure how right now. Not everyone like comments, but I like having the option which is why I mention it. The thing is, I think you could be blogging pretty fast and you don’t need a lot of technical skill for basic blog posting.

Breaking: New Developments

Micro.blog - Joins the half in half out category. Micro Blog owner Manton Reese announced: Micro.blog adding European servers which will allow Micro Blog users the option to be hosted on European servers, but, be aware, this only works for those on their own domain. Even existing MB users can switch. Keep in mind that Micro Blog is an American company, and my comments under Bear Blog (above) still stand, but at least Micro Blog customers can move their data out of the US, which is something

All of these blogs have some sort of feed like RSS. I do think offering readers an email subscription would be a good option in this scenario.

Only you can decide what to do and how crazy things have gotten. But if you intend to continue blogging about politics just keep this in the back of your mind. Just in case.

Did I miss an offshore blog host that I should list? Let me know.