...for domain hosting providers

Being technical service providers, you must be aware of the facilities that the Internet is offering, but that you are not able to supply. The reasons are usually lack of manpower to roll them out, maintain them and provide service on them. In addition, it is useless to do this on your own because most protocols need interaction with all the others on the Internet. Why not get together and get this going in a union of hosting providers?

What we are offering

Service development. We want to make it easy for you to expand your service range. One approach to make that happen is that we are working on a platform that you can install to service your users. Another approach is that this platform permits your users to plugin external components from thrid parties, so your hosting platform can be as simple or as complex as you like; your customers need not run away because they are lacking facilities.

We intend to start off with XMPP chat and SIP telephony (over IPv6), we want to roll out a usermanaged Kerberos single-singon for internal use and links to web technologies such as OpenID, Persona and OAuth to provide access to remote sites; we intend to put LDAP to good use, both for voluntary sharing of contact information and public key information; we intend to accelerate the movement towards OpenSocial standards that empowers domain-hosted communication across individually held domain names. And there's much more on our list -- just see what the IETF has been creating over the years if you want to see more ideas!

Hosting community. We think this can only be accomplished if we bring the hosting industry together, and form a united platform to roll out this technology on a larger scale than any individual hosting company could accomplish. Centralising efforts is also a way of saving on expenses.

Additional revenues. Financially, we are taking another angle than what is common on the hosting market. We are setup as a foundation, and are not aiming for profit; we merely want to cover expenses and use any leftover money to accelerate development of open source solutions that implement more and better Internet protocols. To cover our expenses, we are not asking you for money but instead your customers are requested to add a donation to their hosting deal to enable getting on board with this program. This extra money is then forwarded by you to us, in return for which you can add those customers. We provide straightforward interfaces for automating these processes.

Specialised hosting. In due course, we intend to permit paid plugins under domain names, and place the hosting provider in the position of charging for these services, and forwarding payments to the plugin providers. There generally is room to make some profit on this path, as a result of cutting out banks on individual payments.

What we are asking

Offer a choice now. We are asking you to provide your customers with a choice to get on board with this program. And to charge a monthly fee for it, which can be switched on and off at any moment, as far as we are concerned. We are asking you to forward these donations to our foundation, so we can start to develop.

Prepare to be boarded. We are going to provide systems that will be straightforward to roll out. Specifically, our aim is to have the solutions preconfigured as soon as you have entered the specifics of your environment. These solutions will take the shape of filesystem images running Linux. We are preparing to make it highly efficient to integrate various of these services on a single "metal" host. Please think through the possibilities for your network.

Adopt new infrastructure. We will be assuming that you are offering IPv6 connectivity, with at least a / 64 per customer. We will be assuming that you are running DNSSEC, or are prepared to let us run it for your.

Choose stability levels. We will provide our services at a number of stability levels: Alpha, Beta, RC. At some point, you can decide to implement one of these levels on your systems. It is up to you which level you advertise to your users; users may opt for the Alpha and Beta levels hosted by us if they have a keen interest in trying the newest technologies first.