[TriLUG] In a LUG a long time ago

[Igor Partola]

John,

I am not trying to deceive anyone, or get someone to do something that's
not good for them. I am simply trying to see if there would be interest and
if it's feasible to do this. I can see several benefits to TriLUG offering
services like this. For example, it could be a great opportunity for
someone to learn the ropes of providing such hosting under careful guidance
of the more senior volunteers. It could be an opportunity for TriLUG to
acquire some beefier hardware and its own rack space. It could be a good
service for the members: indeed several people on this thread expressed
interest.

Now, if this ends up not being possible, or if it puts a huge burden on
TriLUG, the SC, etc. then it's not a good idea. Your concern that member
donations might stop and suddenly TriLUG is stuck with the bill are
absolutely valid. This is where assessing the cost is important. If 5
members + volunteers could support this service indefinitely, I think we
have a winner. If it'd take 50+ members, it's a terrible idea.

Regarding just running a VPS with encryption, etc.: there are many
solutions out there that help you do this. For example, I recently tried
out mail-in-a-box (https://mailinabox.email/). It's great. I got up and
running quickly, with little trouble. However, when it comes to my primary
email address, I am looking at solutions that would cost me $10-30/month.
If possible, I'd rather pay that much to TriLUG than keep it for myself.
Let's say there are 5 members in the same boat as I: that's $50-150/month.
Could it be done on that kind of a budget?

One other note: SDF does this (http://sdf.org/?join). For $20-36/year you
can get custom domain email backed by an old and large non-profit
organization focused on *NIX education. Great! My only problem with it is
the low disk quotas: at most 1GB total space for email and web space
(though they do provide 200GB storage space also).

Igor