Greetings! I love the Freedom Box movement and feel it’s a shame the web went the way of commercial servers instead of starting here.
We pay $200/month for high speed, high volume web servers to host newspaper WordPress installs. It opens us up to hackers and downtime on their end – when, in reality, the idea of having this buzzing in a server in my closet connected to the exorbitant cable telecoms bill we also pay is so much more attractive! And real.
Theoretically, this sounds awesome, but what I’d like to do is make it concrete: I’m looking for a Freedom Box pro to help me set this up in NYC. Ideally, we’ll do it on a new mini PC with high RAM and lots of SSD space, and probably end up setting up two of them.
The one technical hurdle I’m trying to find out first is if this can be set up to be strong enough for what we need – the thing with newspaper servers is they can go very fast from a few 1,000 users to 20,000 in an instant and all the way up to 100,000 users online at once when a good story goes viral.
Please get at me if you think we can do it; if you have experience working with friendly neophytes; if you’re local to NYC to actually help configure and install it; and you think this would be fun. Will happily pay for a few hours of your time.
What’s amazing to me is that the response to Freedom Box has only so far been from the tech world, as there’s lots of readers of these online newspapers who I know would love to make the switch – helping to install and customize these for idealistic non-technical peeps could be someone’s niche.
If we can get it to work, I’d happily post free Freedom Box ads – I think this whole thing is brilliant and can’t commend Prof. Eben enough for putting this theory into action!