On 08/11/2007, Kris Douglas <kris(a)softdel.co.uk&gt; wrote: Hmm I had thought about this before, the main problem would be bandwidth cost? Which led me to think about maybe building a Peer-to-Peer Web Server, but not sure if this would solve the problem. -- and I'm not a confident enough programmer to start that project up! On the otherhand isn't Open Source Webhosting done by SourceForge? Which is corperately sponsored and can afford some real heavy server hardware? Though saying that, if people like the LugRadio gang can get hosting from Bytemark(?) then surely it might be possible for us to get hosting for community websites, I think sponsorship is probabily gonna be better than donations in this situation, who knows is Redhat/Novell/Canonical have some spare cash? I seem to have gone round in circles in this post... there is many things to mull over. Good Luck to you, and I'd love to help if anything ever gets moving. -- Adam Nicholls

Take a look at http://www.ukfsn.org/ Jason is an all round nice guy and my ISP to. Ben Kris Douglas wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Kris Douglas wrote: As far as I'm aware Sourceforge host projects, rather than individuals but I could be wrong. Similarly, http://www.uklinux.net/ used to offer free hosting to Free Software projects, but I can't find it on their site any more and again, that doesn't help a group of individials, albeit Linux/FOSS individuals. Heh, yeah it's Bytemark. For those who don't know, as I haven't introduced myself yet (sorry :), I'm a LugRadio presenter, but I had no hand in arranging this. I've kind of thought about this kind of thing too, but never enough to do anything about, I don't have the bandwidth, time or the resources myself, but I'd like to help if I can. If I'm right, you're thinking along the lines of lug.org.uk hosting, but for people rather lugs? Quite a cool idea I think. I think the next step would be to start working out some of the following: 1) What services you would offer (web, mail, databases, PHP, perl, python, workpress etc - remembering that some Ubuntu community servers were completely 0wned as they were out of date and had many different web apps on them). 2) How the system would work, such as security and user separation (would you put them each in their own VM (OpenVZ sounds good for this rather than Xen), use suPHP, chrooted FTP/SSH and so on). 3) Resource limits (ie disk space, no of databases, amount of bandwidth, amount of RAM and processor time if configurable when using a VM). 4) How you will manage the system from a sysadmin point of view - Nagios, Cacti, SNMP etc. 5) How you make it easy for each user to set up their own stuff - give them FTP access and be done, or use a control panel like ISPConfig or one of the other Free ones (I have a list somewhere), or commercial ones (cPanel, Plesk but somebody has to pay). 6) Gauge demand. Nobody might be interested or it might get swamped straight away. It might be a good idea 6) Get some security guru to look it over and see where the weaknesses are. 7) Compare this to the hardware and bandwidth you (we?) can get together. I have my own thoughts, such as either chrooted FTP and suPHP with ISPConfig or Free alternative, or OpenVZ with ISPConfig/alternative and SFTP. The services could be something like 50-100MB disk space (depending on demand/resource ratio and the fact that larger amounts of space attract larger amounts of bandwidth usage), no mail or you(a)communityhosting.org a Wordpress install, 2 or 3 databases (1 for wordpress, 1 for main website, 1 or something else). Alternatively, just a single multi-user wordpress install and some hosting space. Options, options... It might be worth talking to Andy Smith at lug.org.uk about this kind of thing as he handles administration of the lug.org.uk machines and knows first hand what it's like managing managing a busy community hub on not-as-fast-as-it-needs-to-be hardware. Just some thoughts on the subject when I ought to be going to bed... Regards, Adam Sweet - -- http://blog.adamsweet.org/