Welcome to HOBO!
Hobo is a simple
server able to host web sites and email for personal domains.
Owners and Users
You can get involved at one of two levels: as an owner,
or as a user. Owners will invest some money up front
to purchase the machine and for ongoing maintenance, and in
return will have full admin rights.
Owners can set up multiple web sites and users for themselves,
family members or trusted friends, and can choose to charge
their friends and family to cover their costs or make a small
profit. The total cost to start up was around
$1000, so with four of us committed already the cost to you
will be no more than $200 if you choose to get involved in this way.
Users, on the other hand, must be "sponsored"
by one of the owners. The owner will do whatever administrative tasks
are needed, so it's up to each owner to decide how much work
they want to put into this, and thus how many users they want
to support, or at what price. Users will have WebDAV access
to their web site (www.yourdomain.com) and will have email
forwarding (so you@yourdomain.com gets routed to you@shaw.ca
for example) and maybe POP3/IMAP4 or webmail email access. Each owner can set their own
prices as they wish, but I'm guessing if you want to get
involved in this way you can figure on it costing around
$100/year.
Specs
Hobo is a low-end Dell server running Windows 2003
Server, IIS, ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0 beta, SQL Server Express 2005 beta,
DNS, and hMailServer. The server has a 3GHz Xeon chip,
512M of RAM and an 160GB HD, with
plenty of room to add RAM or HDs as we grow into it. It's even got
room for a second processor if we want. It will
be located on our premises but outside our firewall, will have
a single dedicated IP address and will share our 10Mb/s fibre
connection to the Internet.
Please reply to Nate, Blaine, Bryden and Grunau to get involved.
Nate Hekman
Blaine Huntley
Paul Bryden
Paul Grunau
