Ask HN: How about this idea, a 'friends of HN server' ?

I think it's a nice thought, but I don't think a lack of hosting is what's stopping people here from getting their ideas out.

yeah a shared server is all you really need to test an idea out, and that can be had for as little as 2-3 bucks a month.

I used to give free hosting to Indian bloggers and startups. (More bloggers took me up on the offer than startups though.) Tips from my experience:

* I kept it as a first-come-first-serve thing. I didn't want to become the judge out there.

* But I kept a rule from the beginning: people had to move once they became ramen profitable.

* There was no other rule except the obvious: don't abuse the resource. It worked well.

* The only problem I faced is: quite a lot of people who took me up on the free hosting offer didn't do anything with it for months. Didn't put up a single web page online. And only used email. It was free. So they procrastinated. And weren't as aggressive as they would be if they had to pay for hosting.

* So if I were to repeat my offer, I would add Rule # 2: their website or beta has to be up within 2 weeks.

(Also to weed out people who wouldn't use the free hosting after getting it - I started relying on how good they were with follow up. I usually asked a question on their first request. Once they answered that, I asked another question. And only then did I gave the hosting. Its amazing how many non-serious people drop out by that stage. These questions were basic ones: who is going to be your target audience? How many people in your team? Anything to just see their response reaction.)

Thank you, that's very constructive criticism, I like your 'ruleset' quite a bit.

Wow, I'm really quite surprised at the negative sentiment, that's not what I expected.

1) the world is a lot bigger than just the 'affluent' portions of it, in some countries 3 to 5 bucks per month is a big deal, this server will cost a fairly large multiple of that. If you can get a server with these specs for 3 to 5 bucks I'd like to know where.

2) this is a fairly serious server, not some rinkydink slicehost, you could use it to get to a reasonable amount of traffic before you'd have to scale up (if you took some care at making things efficient)

3) most of the 'free' alternatives are just as 'free' as gmail, they require some amount of lock-in, this idea is a fully functional 'you've got root' (or at least the sysadmin will) server.

4) Nobody gets to be locked in to any hosting contracts but me, the bill is mine, the people that use this server host there for exactly $0 plus a promise to try and make a go of it.

5) hcoop gives you 1 GB of disk space and a few GB of data transfer per month for $5. This box has 500 G of disk space (so, let's say it's 5 'tenants' that's 100G per project), and 30T worth of traffic for $0.

I think that is sounds like an awe-inspiring idea if only because it would give a lot of people a chance to try out ideas. It would be nice to see if it spawned community projects that HN members collaborated on.

However, in practice it will probably be a nightmare to try to maintain.

You can get a VPS for $19.95 a month now, with pro-rata billing. Set one up for a couple of days, see what happens, if it fails, cancel it and get most of the $19.95 back.

I don't think server cost is an issue to most people these days. Not until you start to scale, and then it's all good news.

$5 for a VPS

http://prgmr.com/xen/

True true, $20 or $5, it's probably less than most people spend on coffee.

would probably be a lot of work for you.

I mean the cheapest slices over at Slicehost are $20/mon and that should be pretty decent for experimentation puporses. Granted 256mb of RAM isn't a lot but hell I managed to get Firefox to start...

Experimentation nothing -- I ran my business on 256mb of RAM for years.

Apropos the discussion we had earlier today: do you want to be the guy who cleans up after the guys who are either insufficiently invested in the idea of owning a startup to pony up $20 a month, or alternatively are so unskilled that they cannot find $20 a month of gainful employment?

Those that can afford it should probably not apply for this, I'm thinking about people that can't afford it.

How many people who are capable of writing a viable app but can't afford $20/month or less also lack friends who would give them some server space?

I'm serious about this. If someone is so painfully shy or otherwise socially incompetent that they know no one who would give them an account then how are are they going to deal with cultivating customers or buyers?

If their issue is that they just don't have the right friends, then I'd think the right answer is to start cultivating geeky & entrepreneurial friends for the sake of just connecting with some like minded people. Helping facilitate that sort of thing sounds like a fine thing to experiment with, being able to offer them some free server space would just be gravy.

Good points. I think that the answer to the first question is probably almost everybody in the third world for starters, and probably a fair number of people in the former eastblock countries, especially students.

In the 'developed' world probably fewer but it would not surprise me if there are thousands of people in a situation where a free server would just give them the leg up they need to get to 'ramen profitable'.

I love the idea, but agree with others who say it seems like it'd be a tremendous amount of work to manage.

One approach, given the extant free options like Heroku and GAE, would be to focus on what is actually difficult to get for free: various daemons, queues, fast key-value stores, etc. Maybe provide a RESTful interface to provision common cases on demand. That'd be helpful to a lot of people without overlapping too much with existing options or allowing people to execute arbitrary code.

Of course, implementing this is probably a business idea all in itself and may take way more time than you'd want.

Sounds very similar to http://hcoop.net/. It's $5 a month and you get superuser access to almost everything according to the FAQ.

You better virtualize it and pray no one breaches the hypervisor. ;)

In all seriousness, you would definitely want to prevent one user from taking out the whole box. As much as we all trust one another, there is always room for an 'oops, I rm -rf'd /usr/bin...' to happen.

Great idea though, I'd definitely be interested!

That's a good suggestion, but I don't have much experience with hypervisors, how much overhead do you think that would give ?

The overhead of a hypervisor is pretty low. VPS hosts will divide a 16GB 4-8 core machine into 40 pieces with Xen and each slice performs pretty well (provided that not all of them are running CPU intensive jobs at once.

The main overhead is that each virtual machine has its own kernel memory, file cache, etc. There are other virtualization approaches that use a shared kernel, and which may be able to use a single copy of common shared libraries across partitions (not sure about this last part though). FreeBSD jails or OpenVZ on Linux fall into this category.

I can help being the sysadmin and anything else related to this.

It will be a great hands on experience for me.

As for the idea, i believe that it is great. Many students cant really afford buying hosting as it doest come cheap for them ( i couldnt, wish i had ) . And there are other people that most probably would like to hang on to there hard earned cash, but still want to try out something. This will be a cool experience for them.

As for the 256 RAM .... that wont fly with this. Put 10 users on this and it will crawl till it dies ! 2gb is the absolute minimum for this baby !

Conditions can easily change, but it should be a free box to do what you please, but no illegal stuff on it or you will be screwed ( I am sort of safe here in the middle of nowhere ) :D

email at my profile, i hope ! NO SPAMMING !

Not trying to troll or anything, but in the age of services like EC2, App Engine, and Heroku, why would anyone get locked into a long term hosting contract without prior proof of "legs"?

Nobody is getting locked in to anything but me.

EC2, App Engine are lock-in platforms with a price to switch that force your application in to a certain structure.

Heroku is free if you can make your stuff work with 5MB of storage.

How is EC2 a "lock-in" platform, particularly when compared to space on a shared server?

You're right about that, EC2 has it's own 'instance storage', which would take the place of the shared hard disk here.

I was thinking about integrating S3 when you use EC2, but of course you don't have to use S3.

Talk to rackspace's cloud division about doing something. They seem big on working with developers and they offer really small slices. You can spawn via an API, so letting people on/registering and being on their own vps is fairly easy. Maybe do it where it's invite only or there's some advisory board? I don't know how you control who has access,etc.

How's this better than just finding a free PHP host in a free subdomain? (honest question)

Hey Lhorie, do you have an example ?

Lots of PHP hosting providers have free account options. Here's a random one I just googled up:

http://www.000space.com/

Ok, here is the major difference I think:

You'd be sharing the same kind of box as with this hosting provider, but instead of sharing it with several thousand others you'd be sharing it with maybe 5 to 10 others.

You wouldn't be limited to PHP.

You'd have a lot more storage space and bandwidth.

I see. I don't suppose the free CPU cycles would be too critical for someone doing a prototype, but the language freedom is definitely compelling.

With that being said, I think the getting a sys admin part might be tough. FWIW, I hear that many private mmorpg servers die because they overlook the amount of time and money needed to keep a server running.

> I think the getting a sys admin part might be tough.

Someone has already volunteered for that post.

I'm a bit upset at all the negativity though.

Well, if you have a volunteer sys admin, you're all set then :)

There are some free hosting options, though, for example Heroku or Google App Engine.

I don't get what the point is, when you can just push to Heroku and go off one dyno until people pay money.