Hosted Services

Motivation

or.. Why the heck do I do this?

Call me old fashioned but in the early days of the 'net, people did things for other people as a service, out of generousity and and public good. The 'net was also a ticking time bomb in terms of security breaches and such, and in particular, the commercialization of the net has had to retire many of the public offerings (and change the way people think before putting their hosts on the net at all).

Before that even, I ran a BBS, also for public benefit. People used it to communicate with others internationally in group discussions. BBSs were connected to each other by occasionally dialing each other up to exchange new messages with each other.
They also allowed for public distribution of files, mostly catering to the whim of the system operator. Different BBSs catered to different interest groups.

What I run on gigo.com continues in the spirit of public service. We host web sites and mail services to help families keep in contact with each other and publish pictures; we host mailing lists that discuss things such as corvette restoration and woodworking; we host DNS so that people can have their computer on the net (on broadband) be findable so that people can host their own content or run their own mail server.

Web Hosting

Yes, we do web hosting. :-) We have a 10 megabit link at Hurricane Electric, and can go as fast as we want as long as we're willing to pay for it. Our billing is based on the amount of bandwidth that we use 95% of the time. If your bandwidth needs are not high (or you're willing to help cover the bandwidth costs), and you're a friend or a hobby group, poke me.

However, note that we do not use "ftp" here (unless you have a static IP address). We use ssh-based transfers only (scp, sftp). ssh.com has a gui windows client; macssh.com has a mac gui client. Of course, if you're on a mac running osx, you already have "sftp" command line...

If your domain is already hosted here, stats about your domain are collected automaticly at stats.gigo.com .

Mail hosting and forwarding

We host pop/imap mail accounts here. As a bonus, your mail is accessible via web if you wish at mail.gigo.com. You can explicitly tell your browser to trust my site, or ignore the warning. Mac IE users, there is a link on that web site that will install my certificate into your browser.

Mail forwarding is also available. If you want to have your domain's email handled by gigo.com, and then forwarded to your isp/work email account, that is doable. Using your own domain name gives you the flexibility to change ISP's, jobs, etc without having to change your permanent email address. Just let me know where to forward your mail should you switch email providers.

Mailing Lists

Mailing lists allow for email-based group discussion. They generally have an email address where you can send messages to; everyone on the list gets a copy automaticly. People can get added and removed from the list automaticly. They generally allow for moderation, or the lack thereof.

I gladly host mailing lists for hobby groups. Archives are also kept for lists I host at archives.gigo.com. We use mailman as our list manager. Users and admins use a web based form to subscribe and unsubscribe (no unix experience is needed).

DNS hosting and management

DNS hosting is trivial. If your needs are simple, I've also made a web based form to manage your dns data without waiting on me to make your changes, or without you maintaining your zone files.

Also, for any domains I host DNS for, regardless of who manages the zone data, I can do dynamic DNS (using web based updates for windows, or a simple perl script you can 'cron' if you run a real OS).

I can also register domain names at $10 a domain per year for com/.net/.org/.us . However, this requires a bulk prepay order for you (or a group of you and our friends) of 10 domain years minimum. We can divy it up however - but the order must be bulk ordered and prepaid to get domains at this price. I myself no longer keep spare credits on hand (and probably won't again unless the stock market suddenly rains money again).