jay pettitt on 18/6/2009 at 20:19

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I had a crazy idea.

There's a local environment information charity I do things for now and then. The latest thing was to make their FrontPageExpress Tablelicious website from 1994 a bit more 2001 by giving it a database and a content management system and possibly even a style sheet. Which needed a database. Which needed a new webhost.

To cut things short finding a UK or EU based green webhost hasn't been easy. The US is rather better endowed, but UK ones either resell services based in the US (not the end of the world, but it'd be nice to use local services) or rely on (http://www.cheatneutral.com/) carbon offsets, which are better than nothing, but otherwise of dubious benefit.

It's got to the 'sod this' stage and I'm now actively daydreaming about buying a rack, hiring some space in a datacentre (I've found one with some suitable credentials) and starting up a small green webhost using a (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative) cooperative bussiness model.

Never done that before. No idea what I'm doing. Any of you boffins tried anything similar?