+1
I dont necessarily recommend Amazon, but the whole point of Masternodes is the more, the merrier. I've also done DigiOcean, VULTR, Florkinet and others I can't remember the name. The bigger the DRK PoS, and the quicker and stronger price-feedback loop.
Amazon does have numerous regions (data centers) spread out in the world that are totally independent from each other. If the NSA wants to pound on DRK, they'd get their own node up in no time up at all, or hack mainframes, or subpoena much smaller companies than Amazon. Heck Digital Ocean is Microsoft and they alone have 25% of the MN network.
But sure enough you're right. The more distributed the better. Problem is, for the amateur seeking help in services and tutorials, nothing comes close to Amazon in terms of cost, ease of set-up and management and easy-to-maintain-your-self security features with alert etc.
Certainly other VPS have do the "same" features, but in my case, what I do is not just set-up a node and job done, I follow the investor all the way through it and make sure he get it, explaining every detail on how to keep his server healthy, safe and locked down, how monitor the network, and how to manage, backup and keep his coins safe... That is much more important than the choice of VPS provider and following any given tutorial.
I totally agree with you Icebucket, but I think this is more like the hashrate 51% attack boogie-man. There is no incentive really. Nodes hold no personal info, and with Darksend+ , not even collecting years of tx crumbles would they figure out the parties (from what I gathered about it so far).
Other than that, it would take a court-order to take down the network through VPS provider, or a targetted DDoS, and for that, you just need to download the client and run
"darkcoind masternode list"
