Which level of DoS protection is best to start off with for a startup building a social network from the ground up?

If you feel that Clarity isn’t secure enough for your needs, you’re welcome to use another platform. Also, if you have something that’s extremely private, your welcome to use another platform. Clarity is a great platform with great customer support. I’ve needed them numerous times and they’ve always been super responsive and helpful. I only wish they promoted the platform even more. Good luck

Distil Networks is more like a CDN (Content Delivery Network), so every traffic to customers website should pass through Distil server. In other words you have to point your DNS to their CDN (that can potentially bring down your site). They keep analyzing your website through out and if the traffic is found malicious they block. As you asked about competitors, ShieldSquare as a potential alternative, offers following benefits over Distil: Non-intrusive API integration that will not affect your website performance and uptime. Zero False Positives that will ensure that your genuine users are never troubled. I can offer more direction if I know more about your environment. Best Regards, Steven

Well if you built the app then I would suggest add a means to allow the community to flag inappropriate messages, then start banning the responsible users.

The reality is "reputable" growth hackers - aren't sitting around on freelance sites waiting for you to hire them. If they are good, they are either (very) gainfully employed at a reputable company making very good salaries or more likely using our super powers to create multimillion dollar companies. So the bad news is there is no platform where you can hire reputable growth hackers BUT here is what you can do: You can borrow some of their time on here for just a few dollars a minute and learn what you need to learn to do it yourself (or at least get started) or find courses to learn "growth hacking" yourself. Get the tips, learn the techniques, tons of free resources and sites too. Unfortunately there are no silver bullets and very seldom magic hires that will suddenly get you growth. It's a painful, iterative long process. And the term growth hacker is very broad. Some of us can help you with SEO/SEM, email list building, partnerships and PR (I'm heavily specialized in PR). TL:DR Talk to specialized growth hackers, learn, and apply the techniques yourself.

If you're using source control, it's easy to track source and control access — or revoke access — if someone leaves the company. Also, your developers should have signed a contract about the project itself that clearly places the source code under your/the client's/the company's control, and if/when they leave, they release all rights to code created under that contract. You can never be 100% sure, but these small steps will at least ensure a legal high ground should anyone steal code. Good luck!