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