Hi @elfpavlik, thanks for your networking efforts with GEN! I have recently wrote a clarification for the Solawi network, which joined the development of OA/co-munity, but still considering the infrastructure aspect.
In the last years Ecobytes has worked quite informally, providing quality hosting some times, others not, but in general a quite good, affordable and personalized service. But the years before the last the team was reduced, overhead too big and we decided to change something. This last year, with the creation of an association I have pushed a move towards an innovative concept of community-supported (and based) IT, based on a combination of community-supported business models, agile and lean principles, open organization and commoning.
The results are now starting to come - a bunch of collectives and networks, are moving away from their own infrastructures and commercial providers to join efforts in a common/collectively owned, but decentralized and highly portable infrastructure model (through VMs + docker containers, IaaS+PaaS,) of Ecobytes (for an example see here: Root server sharing under supervision of Ecobytes?). And then also SaaS, like is the idea of co-munity.
I write this to make clear that we are not a provider in the traditional sense. We don’t assure a QoS or provide a service against a payment, rather integrate the interested people in co-developing our infrastructure and services. So, for example, if the members community find a certain feature to be very important, then we push it to top priority on future development iterations. And if someone is very interested and can DIY, we can simply set up a VM and give it to the person or team wanting to do it.
This way we incrementally build our non-commercial, community-supported infrastructure and services - and allow the costs to be very low - a membership in Ecobytes costs 60 €/year and gives you access to all services that have been made available at any time. We expect organisations or projects which have some or more budget, to donate voluntary what they can, to help keep the ecosystem alive and fund some priority developments. Further costs may come with support/custom development requests, or extraordinary machine requirements such as disk space > 10 Gb, more CPUs or RAM on VM, domains, SSL-cert, etc…
With this in mind, we can of course assure a QoS, we can provide interfaces (but no CPanel, only free software), etc. This can happen through:
- the community of members/users+developers to decide to put has priority in next development cycles; or
- the interested organisation establishes a contract with an Ecobytes sysadmin to provide the needed things
- the interested organisation brings an own developer and we provide a VM or appropriate environment where he can setup the required services
For Drupal though, we do have web interface and shell access. I consider the new Drupal environment in Ecobytes to be one of the secure, safest and reliable of our infrastructure, which resulted from the fact that it hosts some of the main latest projects and critical services of Ecobytes (e.g. co-munity). We use the BOA (Barracuda-Octopus-Aegir) scripts from omega8.cc which are already very optimized for a Drupal multisites - but we are working to improve it even more and solutions like memcache and varnish are on the list of possibilities to try out.
We can provide an own BOA VM for GEN without much difficulty. But for this, we probably have to ask for extra contribution from GEN, or that a sysadmin of GEN teams up with us to at least share routine tasks (e.g. updates). Alternatively, we can setup an own Octopus instance (in same VM) for GEN to have and manage an own secure Drupal farm.
That’s my contribution to clarify for now. We would of course love to also have GEN on the boat and collaborating with us! And I’m sure GEN has a pool of sysadmins developers that would be happy to join our efforts to provide community-supported and based IT, while working to assure the QoS that GEN requires.