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<h1class="page__group-title">About</h1>
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<p>Hostea provides dedicated managed Gitea hosting, including CI/CD and
static pages. Upgrades are carefully tested and include security
updates. Each Gitea instance is monitored 24/7 and has backups.</p>
<h3id="you-will-want-to-rent-a-gitea-instance-at-hostea-if-you-are">You will want to rent a Gitea instance at Hostea if you are ...<aclass="zola-anchor"href="#you-will-want-to-rent-a-gitea-instance-at-hostea-if-you-are"aria-label="Anchor link for: you-will-want-to-rent-a-gitea-instance-at-hostea-if-you-are"
><spanclass="anchor-icon">#</span></a
>
</h3>
<ul>
<li>Individual software developers or companies who need their own Gitea
instance with CI/CD and static pages but can't be bothered with
installation and maintenance. You want the freedom to download a
backup and seamlessly self-host it whenever you decide: no strings
attached.</li>
<li>Organizations that want to resell Gitea hosting under their brand and
rent the infrastructure at a discounted price. You want the option to
run the Hostea infrastructure on your own hardware in the future and
seamlessly migrate your clients.</li>
</ul>
<h3id="committed-to-free-software-and-radical-transparency">Committed to Free Software and Radical Transparency<aclass="zola-anchor"href="#committed-to-free-software-and-radical-transparency"aria-label="Anchor link for: committed-to-free-software-and-radical-transparency"
><spanclass="anchor-icon">#</span></a
>
</h3>
<ul>
<li>Everything is public, there are no internal discussions, all financial
records are public down to the last cent</li>
<li>Every piece of software is and will always be exclusively Free
Software so that it can be self-hosted by users and re-used by
competitors</li>
<li>Private data (names, addresses, etc. ) is carefully protected and
destroyed as soon as possible</li>
</ul>
<h3id="hostea-is-operated-by-a-collective-of-individuals-and-organizations">Hostea is operated by a collective of individuals and organizations<aclass="zola-anchor"href="#hostea-is-operated-by-a-collective-of-individuals-and-organizations"aria-label="Anchor link for: hostea-is-operated-by-a-collective-of-individuals-and-organizations"
><spanclass="anchor-icon">#</span></a
>
</h3>
<p>The members of Hostea are like minded individuals and organizations who
share the same commitment to Free Software and transparency. They share
the Hostea income in proportion of their involvement which is recorded
in a publicly available spreadsheet for everyone to audit.</p>
<p>The motivation for becoming a member of Hostea can be:</p>
<ul>
<li>To refer the occasional customer to Hostea, knowing it has a vote to
influence where Hostea is going.</li>
<li>To provide Gitea hosting to its clients under its own brand because it
is easier than setting up Hostea on their own hardware to do the same.
And knowing that when they want to do so it will be as easy as
possible.</li>
<li>To make a living as a Free Software developer working on developing
and maintaining Hostea. The time logged working on Hostea will be
compensated with the income.</li>
<li>To support the idea of a sustainable online service exclusively based
on Free Software (there are actually very few of them, it is a non
trivial problem to solve) and do nothing. In which case there won't be
any income distributed to the member.</li>
<li>To free developers from centralized forges lock-in by providing a
reliable alternative and work on the Ansible playbooks to maintain
Hostea. In which case the member is entitled to a share of the income
in proportion of the time.</li>
</ul>
<h3id="truly-self-hostable">Truly self-hostable<aclass="zola-anchor"href="#truly-self-hostable"aria-label="Anchor link for: truly-self-hostable"
><spanclass="anchor-icon">#</span></a
>
</h3>
<p>When self-hosting the development of a software project is difficult, it
is a theoretical possibility that has no practical use. The Gitea
project itself has been stuck on GitHub for many years. Hostea is
committed to provide a seamless migration path to self hosting. A
virtual machine to run the Gitea instance, including CI/CD and static
pages can be downloaded at any time. It can then be booted on premise or
in the cloud.</p>
<p>The infrastructure as code running Hostea itself is published,
documented and tested so that it can also be used on premise. Either to
manage the virtual machine retrieved from Hostea, with the same user
panel, monitoring, backups etc. Or to run a public Gitea hosting service
identical to Hostea and become a competitor.</p>
<h3id="interoperable-with-existing-infrastructures">Interoperable with existing infrastructures<aclass="zola-anchor"href="#interoperable-with-existing-infrastructures"aria-label="Anchor link for: interoperable-with-existing-infrastructures"
><spanclass="anchor-icon">#</span></a
>
</h3>
<p>Running Hostea with its integrated monitoring and backup system is an
interesting proposition: all in one. When it is deployed within an
existing infrastructure that has its own backup and monitoring setup, it
provides:</p>
<ul>
<li>A monitoring endpoint to get a global health status (red/green) which
is an aggregation of the probes deployed to verify Gitea runs,
security updates have been applied, the latest upgrades are installed,
backups have been successfully created, communicates with the CI etc.</li>
<li>A backup download endpoint to get a copy of the backups so they can be
stored in the existing backup system for safekeeping</li>
</ul>
<h3id="hostea-is-not">Hostea is not ...<aclass="zola-anchor"href="#hostea-is-not"aria-label="Anchor link for: hostea-is-not"
><spanclass="anchor-icon">#</span></a
>
</h3>
<ul>
<li>Hostea is not a shared Gitea hosting facility that can be used for free
such as Codeberg. It provides dedicated Gitea instances for a fee.</li>
<li>Hostea is not a company with shareholders that make a passive income.
The income is redistributed to the people and organizations doing the
work. The workers are also empowered with every decision about Hostea,
