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Interested in teaming up for good web hosting / website accounts?

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mouser:
We have no interest in becoming web hosting resellers for a variety of reasons (no desire to keep track of payments, no desire to have an adversarial relationship trying to keep track of who is using up all the bandwidth/cpu), but i am curious to know if there are people here who would be interested in pooling our resources to pay for a dedicated server which could host web sites and home pages of our members.

if there were enough of us it would be possible to pool our money and get a fantastically fast and stable and big server with every feature on the planet.

most individuals buy a cheap hosting plan, say $4 to $10 per month, and companies make a huge profit off these small and limited accounts.

but if for example 10-30 of us got together and pooled their money, combined with the money donationcoder would put in for our contribution (maybe $80 per month), we could pay for an amazing server that would be 10x better for each individual than the cheap accounts, at the same price.  so for example if we got 30 people willing to pay $8 per month, then this might be something worth pursuing..

but if we did try to do this we'd have to find a way to do it that didn't require the hassle of trying to collect money and stuff.  not sure exactly how to do that.. probably not a feasible idea..  we'd also have to find someone to volunteer to do tech support and help install stuff, for the reward of having a free account on the server..

anyway, just an idea.

mouser:
or maybe twice the people at half the contribution,

or have a kind of pay-as-you-can afford donation based hosting?

we could be the first such group effort?

each users pays what they can, within reason? assuming no one uses up too much bandwidth (probably the limits would be very generous if there was enough of us, better than your normal $8 a month hosting).

vegas:
Count me in.  I had a site up for a friend who passed away 3 years back.  But the person doing my dns forwarding (i believe thats what it is) disappeared about 8 months ago. I personally feel the need to get this site back up & also have interest in having a site for myself hosted.  This would be a great way to do it, in the spirit of the DonationCoder way! I would be more than happy to contribute say $5-10 a month on a regular basis, or more if there was high usage of my domain (which i doubt).  The best part would be, I would get what I need while donation coder is just like sharing out extra space & bandwith over the top of what it needs.  I like, I'm down, Where do I sign? :)

mouser:
this would be a win-win thing for all of us if there were enough of us willing to jump in together.
and the more i think of it the more i think it might be worth at least experimenting a little without needing commitments from anyone.

i think we may try to upgrade to a better plan (though not the full dedicated server we would want eventually) for a month or so just to see what kind of speed we could get, and provide free web hosting accounts for any dc member that wants, just to play with and see if its something you might be willing to chip in on and support eventually.

so if its something you think you might be interested in, post a reply with your thoughts - it's not a commitment on your part to join in - we just want to get some idea of how many people might be interested in this.

if we do do it, it will only be if we can commit to doing it properly.

kfitting:
One thing to keep in mind is that as soon as anyone hears about "free" anything word will be spread around like wildfire.  Spymac did this just before google came out with gmail; they advertised free 1 gig email accounts and they had such a flood of new members they couldnt handle it.  I know, you're not saying free hosting, but even saying donation hosting is essentially saying free hosting to the masses. 

Not saying it's a bad idea (I personally would love a free/cheap website just to upload pictures for my family to view) but be prepared for tremendous growth.  Plus, anytime anything is free, it tends to bring in the riffraff; people who spark flame wars, complain about everything, etc. 

I'm also NOT saying this should be an elitest club so we can all feel comfortable... that is wrong as well!  Just saying that you're going to have to be prepared.  As far as I'm concerned, I wouldnt mind a small page for myself to put up pictures or random thoughts.  But, it is extremely low priority on my budget right now.

Intrigued? Yes, but not sure how you would go about it!

Kevin

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