Mass centralization. Old school forums like phpBB and SMF and vBulletin and new-school forums like self-hosted discourse are also centralized, but by one small user calling the shots, and it’s very clear immediately which forums are well-run. If a forum isn’t well-run with a good community, a ‘competitor’ will quickly pop up that is, and people will go to it. Sure, you have to have some tech skills but there are easy guides for all of it. Discourse is a simple docker image and it’s the best for features and engagement IMO.
Sure you have to sorry about DDoS attacks and staying patched, but you can use OVH or another host with a large infrastructure that had DDoS resistant servers. Or, god forbid, cloudflare.
Since its servhold, you may be able to remove the offending content (for a short time, anything public-facing) and then contact reg.xyz to get it unsuspended. You’re right though that’s not very good customer service.
On a related note, it’s possible a misconfiguration allowed some of the contents or index to be shown publicly and it got caught in a search engine and was taken down in an automated DMCA sweep. I believe .xyz is an American registrar so have to respond to DMCA but could be wrong on that. I like to stay with any .TLD that archive uses… md, ph, etc.
https://help.sav.com/hc/en-us/articles/11933048624923-Resolving-serverHold-on-Your-Domain