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Building a web host for 2025 in Public

Table of Contents

Since 2018 I have been offering private cloud infrastructure to businesses around the globe. In the course of this work I have observed there is a lot of commonality to the technical and business challenges encountered by these customers. The outstanding deficiency in the majority of solutions offered by the market is a lack of sustainability and a strong tendency towards lock-in of one form or another.

My response is to make the services and infrastructure I currently deliver available to all, by building the next generation of Gigaquad in public: a transparent, sustainable, accessible and fair web infrastructure business. The web the way it was meant to be. No distortions by hype, capital, ideology or markets. Just servers and software delivered at a fair price with fair conditions that are sustainable for us and the customer over the long term.

Principles

The primary purpose of this project is to empower individuals and organisations by ensuring that the services and infrastructure they depend on are :

  1. Fairly Accessible – Services are reasonably priced with no manipulative or perverse incentives. There are no arbitrary barriers to signup and on-boarding begins at the lowest practical specification. With the level of resource consumption being the primary determinant of pricing.
  2. Transparent – Technologies, policy, procedures and pricing are all documented and publicly accessible to the greatest extent that is practical and operationally secure.
  3. Open Source – Wherever possible open software and technology will be utilised ro deliver services. Financial and practical support will be provided to upstream projects. Any software developed in-house will be open source licenced.
  4. Sustainable – The focus of all decisions will be supporting the customers and platform over the long-term. Pricing will be guaranteed for a reasonable period of time. Customers will receive additional benefits the longer they remain on the platform. Hardwade and POP Investment will prioritise steady, long-term growth.
  5. Fungible – Customers should be able to migrate away from the platform with ease. This will be guaranteed by the conventional use of open-source technology, meaning there will be no proprietay secret sauce or PaaS trap. The software and hardware technologies employed should be non-proprietary, portable, with no lock-in and no blackboxes.

Next

I am currently building the website and ecommerce platform, along with a public customer control panel. The current configuration management and orhestration tooling needs to be extended to enable integration with the customer control panel and ecommerce.

In March I will take custody of 20RU of colocation space in Melbourne’s Equinix ME2 datacenter. I am currently preparing the servers for this deployment. This will consolidate all my equipment in Australia and allow me to expand to offer services publicly. I also have dedicated equipment with Hetzner in Germany and OVH in France and Canada.

The first available products are likely to be Nextcloud, WordPress, Drupal and email hosting. This will be followed by VDS machines at the Melbourne location.

 

 

Originally posted at https://www.dfoley.ie/blog/building-web-host-for-2025-in-public

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