The far-right message board 8chan has been flickering on and offline, after being knocked offline Sunday by the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.

Cloudflare stopped servicing 8chan on Sunday, after a shooting suspect allegedly posted a white nationalist rant on the site before killing more than 20 people in El Paso.

On Monday morning, 8chan briefly found another service to provide it online protection: Epik.com, which advertises itself as a “non-discriminatory provider” with “a proven commitment to liberty”.

This year, Epik acquired BitMitigate, the same security firm that the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer moved to in 2017 after Cloudflare dropped it. Epik also chose to serve as the registrar for Gab.com, the “free speech” social media site used by a terrorist who killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018, after GoDaddy kicked it off following the attack. The Seattle-based firm is helmed by Rob Monster, who says he believes in “digital sovereignty” and considers Epik “the Swiss Bank of Domains”.

“The danger of not proactively embracing digital sovereignty, in all its forms, is that the digital world will inevitably find a way to achieve it, with or without domain names,” said Monster when defending the decision to take on Gab.com.

Epik, however, relies heavily on the infrastructure provider Voxility, which quickly cut off the company – and the Daily Stormer – when alerted of 8chan’s move. An administrator for 8chan tweeted on Monday that the site promised to “stay the course” and bring services back online as soon as possible.

8chan will soon run out of mainstream networks to use, Alex Stamos, former chief security officer at Facebook and professor at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, told the Guardian.

“We will see if they find someone else willing to host them before they get kicked off again,” he said. “In the long run, there are a number of web hosts in Russia that charge a lot of money to host content that nobody else wants to host – that means 8chan would ultimately be much slower and much less effective.”

The public pressure for companies like Cloudflare to put a stop to sites like 8chan represents a growing understanding of the internet infrastructure that enables hate speech and human rights abuses, said Brandi Collins-Dexter, senior campaign director at the online racial justice organization Color of Change.

“A year ago, people did not know much about what Cloudflare did,” she said. “But the more you bring them to the forefront, the more people will be asking them why they are allowing this to continue on their watch and the more pressure they will feel.”

Meanwhile, free speech advocates worry platforms and online content services removing 8chan could lead to other sites being censored – and note that hate speech will still exist regardless of how many websites are de-platformed.

Internet infrastructure services should “tread carefully” when determining what to remove from the internet, said Cindy Cohn, executive director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a not-for-profit digital privacy and free speech organization. “Otherwise, we will be establishing a powerful tool for censorship that will inevitably be exploited by repressive governments and other powerful actors,” she said.

But de-platforming hate sites like 8chan could push them further underground, said Benjamin T Decker, CEO of the digital investigations consultancy Memetica. He noted his research showed there was already discussion among followers of 8chan of moving the platform to the dark web, a network of unindexed sites that require a special browser to access. This means fewer people could stumble upon the site inadvertently and become radicalized by the content.

“You can think of it as a contagion effect,” he said. “If this is a radicalization virus we want to neutralize it and bury it and isolate it as deep as humanly possible so it doesn’t affect any new individuals.”

Moving 8chan to the dark web would make it less accessible to the average person but could cause more dangerous speech to proliferate and have mixed implications for safety on and offline.

“In terms of cleaning the stream, it is a positive thing for internet users overall,” he said. “The concerning part is as things go further underground, we could lose some sight of the actual problem.”