Since this past August, the Daily Stormer, a prime hub for neo-Nazism on the Web, has found itself in a peculiar kind of digital exile. Its journey began in the wake of the “Unite the Right” rally, in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which a young woman named Heather Heyer was murdered by a man who drove a car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters. The following day, Andrew Anglin, the Daily Stormer’s founder, published an article about Heyer titled “Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut.” Hours later, GoDaddy, one of the Web’s largest domain registrars, announced that it was cancelling the Daily Stormer’s service. Several other U.S.-based companies, including Google, Namecheap, and Cloudflare, soon followed suit.

In the ensuing four months, the site bounced around the world, with brief stays at top-level domains representing various countries—.ru (Russia), .al (Albania), .at (Austria), .is (Iceland), .ws (Western Samoa). During the tumultuous period surrounding 2017’s independence referendum in Catalonia, the Daily Stormer took advantage of a .cat domain; five days later, the site was banished to obscurity once again, eventually resurfacing at a .ai domain, in Anguilla. Then, last month, the neo-Nazis apparently found their promised land. After being ousted from its .hk domain by the Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation, the site resurfaced at a new, non-geographical domain: .red.

As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I took some satisfaction from the irony—a site with a section dedicated to the “Jewish Problem,” condemned to wander the wilderness, driven out of one country after another. I set out to discover how the Web’s most virulent anti-Semites kept getting back on their feet. Who were the domain registrars, content hosts, and other providers working to keep the Daily Stormer online? Were they Nazi sympathizers themselves? Free-speech absolutists? Or just in it for the money? And what rationalization could they offer for supporting a publication that has declared me and my family subhuman—if, indeed, they knew what they were doing at all? As I began my search, I was quickly plunged into a dizzying new world of proxy servers, shadowy data centers, and matryoshka-like holding companies—the means by which hate metastasizes on the Internet.

Anglin founded the Daily Stormer in 2013, naming it for Hitler’s favorite tabloid, Der Stürmer. The site has consistently aimed to draw in younger audiences, those perhaps merely exploring the concept of white supremacy. A recently leaked style guide makes the publication’s aesthetic goals and ethos explicit. “The reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor, and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points,” Anglin writes. “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.” Later, he adds, “This is obviously a ploy and I do want to gas kikes.” (Neither Anglin nor Andrew Auernheimer, who has long served as the Daily Stormer’s Web master, responded to requests for comment.) Some of the site’s readers have taken its missives in deadly earnest, including Dylann Roof, who fatally shot nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; James Harris Jackson, who is accused of using a sword to murder a black man in New York City, last spring; and William Atchison, who killed two high-school students in New Mexico, a month ago.

Although the Daily Stormer’s ideological project was clear, I soon found its technical underpinnings to be frustratingly opaque. A cursory search revealed its domain registrar to be GKG, a firm based in Texas. Like GoDaddy, GKG serves as a kind of switchboard, linking a site’s URL (used by humans) with a corresponding numeric I.P. address (used by computers). When I asked the company’s representatives for comment about their genocidal guests, they replied curtly. “While GKG does NOT endorse the beliefs or content on the site, the registrant has not broken any laws or violated our terms of service,” Michael Mahoney, of the company’s abuse team, told me. (Those terms of service contain a clause prohibiting “blatant expressions of bigotry, racism, or hatred.” Recent headlines from the Daily Stormer: “Synagogue Honors Jewish Murderers and Pimps for Hanukkah”; “Black Ape Robs 74-Year-Old White Woman on an Elevator.”) Mahoney continued, “In cases where laws are clearly being violated, we can act accordingly. Those that are not so clear are reserved for the US Court to decide.”

I was already at the limit of my technical knowledge, so I turned to Yonatan Zunger, a former Google engineer, for advice. With his help, I found the Daily Stormer’s I.P. address, which turned out to be registered to a Canadian company called Frantech Solutions. It was here that I encountered Francisco Dias, the founder of Frantech and two affiliated companies, BuyVM and Buyshared. (A portrait of Dias on BuyVM’s Web site shows him looking pensive at a black-tie event, elbows inches from a mostly eaten slice of chocolate cake.) Through his companies, Dias rents out server space in Las Vegas, New Jersey, and Luxembourg—the last of which, according to BuyVM’s site, offers especially “strong privacy and freedom of speech laws.” When I contacted Dias to ask him about his involvement with the Daily Stormer, he replied at some length. “I try my very best to take the most neutral stance when it comes to things like this,” he wrote. “I’d prefer they weren’t hosted here, but minus some people trying to sling bad press at me, they’ve broken no laws I’m aware of.”

This wasn’t the first controversial Web site that Dias had abetted. Last year, on the Daily Kos, Margaret Pless called him out for hosting an infamous cyberbullying hub called Kiwi Farms, which, as she noted in a separate article for New York, “specializes in harassing people they perceive as being mentally ill or sexually deviant in some way.” The site has been associated with at least one target’s suicide. Pless told me that she had attempted to contact Dias multiple times without receiving a response. Later, though, Kiwi Farms apparently switched providers, quietly vacating Frantech’s servers.

At the time I first got in touch with Dias, BuyVM’s terms of service prohibited “Any content that violates Canadian, United States, and Luxembourg laws.” Since Canada has a law explicitly forbidding the promotion or advocacy of genocide, I pointed Dias to a recent Daily Stormer article that called Slobodan Praljak, a former general in the Croatian Army who was convicted of war crimes against Bosnia’s Muslim population, a hero; the article also compares the murder of thousands of Muslims to “spraying termites.” Dias said that he hadn’t heard from Canadian law enforcement, though he was “sure” people had reached out to them about it. (BuyVM’s terms of service have since been updated to indicate that the company does its best “to follow a Law of the Land stance when it comes to content hosted within our services”—without specifying any particular law or land.) Moreover, Dias contended, he only provided the site with bandwidth; someone else hosted the data. But who?

In Dias’s initial correspondence, he had directed me to another company, BitMitigate, which provides the Daily Stormer with protection against cyberattacks. In August, BitMitigate’s twenty-year-old founder, Nick Lim, posted a statement defending his decision to work with the Daily Stormer, appealing to the Founding Fathers and “the right to freedom of expression enshrined within our constitution.” (In an interview that month, Lim provided another rationale, telling ProPublica, “I thought it would really get my service out there.”) When I contacted Lim, he provided one more layer of protection to the site: he refused to disclose who hosted the Stormer’s data, citing “user privacy and security.” Stressing that he himself did not provide it, he wished me the best.

At this point, despite Zunger’s guidance, I began to feel as if I were playing a confusing, exhausting shell game, rife with terms I’d never encountered before. I’d been rebuffed, then pointed toward the law and the police—in Canada and in the United States—by two different companies, and toward the Constitution by a third. The tech-bro rhetoric of freedom rang in my ears like an ugly bell. All this to protect a site that calls the N.F.L. the “Negro Felon League” and called the stabbing of a Jewish citizen of Jerusalem “the beginning of the party.”

It’s difficult, at best, to reconcile this abhorrent rhetoric with the high-handed language—of neutrality, of freedom—that is used to defend it. Moreover, appeals to “the law of the land,” which Dias made repeatedly, are somewhat undercut by the fact that one country’s residents can engage in digital activities across borders, in lands with different laws; it’s hard not to feel that actors like Dias use the authorities as a shield for impropriety. And, after chasing the Daily Stormer as far as I could go, I was left with a troubling question: Who, in the face of open neo-Nazism, wants to “stay neutral”? And is enabling this type of rhetoric, and perhaps inspiring further real-life violence, all that neutral after all?