paulm.com has been operating from a high-speed datacentre for a number of years now. As a service I host other folks' websites, mail, DNS, etc here too. The main benefits are personal connection, highly customisable set-ups, and generally competitive featureset for the money (comparable to having your own co-lo'ed machine).

(If you're interested in the technical aspects you can read more about that.)

Things that people like about being hosted here

• No pop-up/over/under/in-yer-face ads
• knowing the owner, direct response
• ability to run almost any service you can conceive so long as I can set it up & it doesn't gobble tons of bandwidth
• not just mail, but web-administered mailing lists! (E.g. Surfside)
• hardcore anti-spam service
• ability to have bazaar-style negotiations on things; for what you use, not what you don't
• flexible payment system (e.g. paypal)
• cheaper since presumably I don't have the overhead of running a business. I have no intention of making money on this, just being able to afford it and continue a cool service to friends and keeping my own ultra-hacked & tweaked playground online
• leading edge technologies available, including perhaps some things you would get nowhere else, like access to a full Oracle & WebLogic install
• Multiple databases, with secure web access: MySQL, PostrgreSQL (Oracle dev possible). Learn more about database access.
• all sorts of wacky stuff with Apache, mail, LDAP, etc possible. Check out some possible service ideas
• cheap domain registration & DNS: costs me about $15/yr with a spam-free provider (bulkregister.com)
• potential for plenty of storage (120GB of striped strorage online on main server)
• I could be looking for co-sysops too, if you're a unix admin junky perhaps there's some connection possible there

Basic things offered

• Web site, i.e. you transfer stuff to the machine then everyone can see it
• DNS, i.e. the whole business of going from "paulm.com" to the actual numerical address of my machine
• Mail, i.e. receiving and retrieving
• Unlimited email addresses by arrangement
• Low spam (email junkmail): I run a number of fairly aggressive anti-spam measures which helps keep spam at bay.
• Stats on your site usage, e.g. paulm.com stats. Log files available on request.
• Secure access: e.g. scp, sftp, rsync, ssh (where nec)
• CGI programs

It doesn't have to stop there, have a look at some other service ideas.

Basic things requested

There's a general monthly donation of a tenner suggested. I use paypal (no payments with credit cards though, please! Paypal charge for it) and Paul Makepeace's Amazon wish list.

I also would like a a link back from sites to here and realprogrammers.com, E.g. a bit of text that says something like,

Hosted by <a href="http://paulm.com/">Paul Makepeace</a> @ <a
href="http://realprogrammers.com/">Real Programmers</a>

Plus minus your own artistic styles and wording :-)

Sound interesting? Want to get set up?

-- Paul