My privacy hardening tips are:

• Avoid 5-eyes, 9-eyes and 14-eyes countries^[1].
• Don’t use CloudFlare or any CDN/AntiDDOS services because they decrypt all traffic that goes to and from your server^[2]^. You don’t know what they do with it.
• DNS queries sent by the server should be encrypted^[3] so that the ISP/data center cannot see them.
• If you want a VPS: try getting KVM instead of LXC one. It’s so easy to automate processes scanning on the fly^[4]

Switzerland

Iceland

To really be censorship resistant you have to follow the example of the pirate streaming services. Have servers in multiple places. Multiple domain names. Be resilient to any instance going down.

Any capability the server has to violate user privacy a government has. So ensure you have as few capabilities as possible to violate privacy. If your users are very vulnerable make sure that you don’t have the data to expose them ever.

You can consider hosting in a “safe country” That’s just the beginning. You could make your service available on tor via hidden service address. That way even if users don’t have good operational security themselves you try to protect them from leaking their activity to whoever their vulnerable to

Switzerland, Iceland, Finland, Spain, Egypt,Sweden, and some 3rd world countries that don’t really give a shit (though they might give a shit if your country makes them give a shit)

Here is an article that helps a bit with that.

It goes almost without saying that you definitely want to avoid the United States and even more so China, Russia and so forth.

Somewhere in South America

Sweden or Switzerland have good laws for this.

Honestly self host with physical security. As long as your house isn’t raided your fine.

You could also setup a vps gateway that routes traffic over wireguard into a isolated environment at home. This should be better for privacy.