Re: Idea: 'ethical hosting' [formerly mailman service (free for FOSS projects)]

[Pjotr Prins]

On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 10:13:23PM +0200, Hartmut Goebel wrote:
> Am 18.04.2017 um 19:59 schrieb Pjotr Prins:
> > there is actually a business case for something like ethical hosting.
> 
> I also see some demand for ethical hosting, esp. for collaboration
> services like mailman, chat, file-share, a simple web-site, etc. I get
> questions about this quite often. But most times the people are neither
> capable to setup and maintain a server at all – or they don't want to
> spend the money.

We provide the actual images for free, so they could start up anywhere.

> E.g. at 1blu.de you can get a vServer with Plesk admin interface for 8 €
> per month. This includes KVM virtualization (or virtuozzo if you
> prefer), a web-mailer, mailinglists via plesk (mailman in the
> background) and a domain.
> 
> So I don't see a business case here :-(

Heh. It is actually proof that there is a business there, otherwise
they would not do it. The underlying VPS costs 3/m, so their markup is
5/m. And that is without any monitoring or tuning - just a simple
installation.

For a 2-person business you need about 10K/m. So you can compute how
many clients we need. And taking over a company mail server with
webmail and mailman, I am sure we can ask 5-10K per year. 

You can grow in either direction. Main problem is starting up as it
needs some investment.

Pj.