permaculture

[Sean Maley <semaley@yahoo.com>]

I have the pictures and have already offered them to
Graham.  It sounds like the site can be easily
recovered.  This is a good example of how working
together can benefit us all.  Perhaps this would be a
good time to review an offer for the web-site hosting
cooperative.

As it stands, many of us face the same options for
starting a web site; $3 to $40 per year for the name
and anywhere from advertising infested free to perhaps
$20/mo for a high quality, ad free host.  For what
most of the current sites accomplish, you shouldn't be
paying any more than $25 to $75 per year when all is
said and done.  This is for each domain, where some of
us have several.

Some of us have permanent high speed connections that
we could be offering as a host for permaculture web
sites, bringing costs for these sites to less than
$10/year for those willing to risk more frequent down
time (what if they loose a connection while on
vacation?).  Somebody pays the $50/mo, but they would
be doing that anyway, so it wouldn't be fair to pass
along costs you would pay anyway.

The next better option is having an existing business
use one of their hosts for a site, as PIW does with
ibiblio.  This is great if you can get it, but isn't
going to be available to us all.  Even further is the
loss of system administration privileges we would have
with a private host.  I haven't found an ecovillage
able to economically tap into the internet either.

For the rest of us, we must either deal with the ads,
deal with the host software provided, pay for a
managed host ($50 to $150 per month), or open a shared
office space with appropriate internet connectivity
(at least $300/mo to do it right).  With the cost
spread amongst several parties, say ten, these numbers
become $5/mo to $30/mo per site, which is what many do
anyway.

Since first making a request for a permaculture
hosting coop, I have found many opportunities to make
these numbers even more favorable.  Here in NYC we
have a few dozen CSA groups connected with a similar
number of farms and businesses.  My CSA turned out to
be paying $95/yr for their web site, or the equivalent
of ten groups paying a total of $79+/mo for a simple
site.  With many more sites than ten, these CSA groups
could band together, much like we can, to save money.

If we have several groups around the world, we can
additionally archive our sites within a network of
hosts.  When a host goes out of commission, it is a
simple matter to point the domain to a working host
within the network.  If a rogue government seizes
equipment, as we have seen recently, the site/data are
preserved all over the world.  Down time can be
limited to mere hours, even with cable modem hosts and
FBI agents.  It is also a reasonably simple task to
automate switching the sites over to the functioning
hosts when these outages are detected.

Who would like to participate in a cooperative network
of permaculture sites?  I propose one or more of our
501c3 (and the non-USA equivalents) permaculture
organizations establish a trust at the PCU (or
equivalent foreign bank) for managed servers.  If
there is an ecovillage available with proper internet
connectivity, then even better, because a data center
would be great to heat a commercial composting
facility.  Remember, all I am proposing is that we
take money we are already spending and pool it
together for a more wise investment supporting each
other.


-Sean.

--- Jean Luc Girard <jeanlucgirard@online.fr> wrote:
> Dan Moore wrote:
> 
> >http://www.archive.org/
> >  
> >
> Yes I tried this and some other, and managed to
> recover most of all pages.
> Only a couple of pictures are missing (maybe the
> biggest ?)
> I sent all to Graham !
> 
> JLuc
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
>
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture
> 


                
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