How does Gab stay online after being deplatformed?

Gab stays online by owning its own infrastructure — servers, payment processing, and operations — rather than renting from third parties who could terminate service under political pressure.

The 2018 lesson

The 2018 deplatforming was effective because Gab, like most internet services, depended on rented infrastructure: hosting from Joyent, payments from PayPal and Stripe, domain registration from GoDaddy. Each of those chokepoints was activated simultaneously. The lesson was clear: any external dependency is a potential shutdown vector.

What changed

After 2018, Gab systematically replaced every rented service with an owned one:

• Hosting: Moved to owned physical servers in owned or contracted data center space.
• Payments: Built in-house payment processing for GabPRO subscriptions, eliminating PayPal and Stripe dependencies for platform revenue.
• Domain: Reconfigured domain management to avoid the type of registrar seizure attempted in 2018.
• CDN and DDoS protection: Migrated to infrastructure that doesn't depend on third-party CDN and DDoS providers that have shown willingness to terminate service to controversial platforms under pressure.

The result

Since rebuilding its infrastructure in 2018–2019, Gab has operated continuously without a forced outage due to deplatforming. Brief downtime events have been for maintenance or DDoS attacks — not because any single provider cut off service. The platform's digital sovereignty is a direct product of the 2018 experience.