With how many lawsuits they get and the total amounts they now have technically lost in court, how is it possible they still hide their hosting infrastructure? Anna’s archive hosts a truly monumental amount of content and its not like its exactly easy to host petabytes(?) of content in secret easily. Hell the orders for hard drives should make it easy to find them. It’s not like they can just tuck a raspberry pi with an Ethernet connection somewhere and throw up a proxy and call it a day. What kind of techniques are required to hide that amount of infrastructure? Especially under such scrutiny as the US government and many publishers coming for their throats I can’t imagine it’s a small feat.
Old Oil mining rigs are known to be used for that. Other than that, as long your IP is sufficiently masked it doesnt matter if your servers are prominent or hidden in a bunker. Noone knows whats inside besides operators.
However, i think they broke TOR’s vpn ip masking by analysing traffic patterns on network nodes. So if they really wanna catch you, you are better somewhere they have no way of coming close. Think russia or other countries not too friendly with usa and not giving a flying fuck about copyright. The physical location of servers that is. The admin could sit comfy in the usa.
Also you could have the data encrypted on an AWS bucket but the server decrypting that should be more secure. Not sure how much traffic those sites have but that could ease the strain of on premise infrastructure you have to maintain.