TuxFamily services soon to be moved to a revolutionary hostees-driven cloud-powered structure

Posted on Monday 1 April 2013

Greetings,

As you already know, TuxFamily, while being a centralized hosting solution since its creation, has always been in favor of self-hosting, and more generally in favor of anything that makes hostees more responsible and involved in the various hosting-related processes.

That's why the TuxFamily administrators strove to entirely rework VHFFS. As a recall, VHFFS means Virtual Hosting For Free Software; it is the software component which takes care of TuxFamily's infrastructures consistency. This rework gave birth to VHFFS 365.

Nicknamed "CloudFamily", this new version will radically change the organization and inner working of TuxFamily -- indeed, it intends to make the whole platform distributed following a P2P-style design. Each hostee will move up from simple services requester to the status of active node of the TuxFamily network.

From a technical point of view, each hostee will have to setup on their own side a virtual machine and provide a good quality network access along with sufficient disk space to store TuxFamily's data. At first, a 5 Mbits/s symmetric connection, a few hundreds GigaBytes (GB) of disk space and an availability of 23 out of 24 hours will be deemed acceptable to keep enjoying the services of our platform.

Relying on the global fast spreading of fibre channel within residential areas and the abiding capacity increase of hard disk drives, we assess the hosting conditions will not leave anybody behind starting from May 2013. Of course, once arrived to this due date, we will have to cease hosting the few potential refractory hostees who would not or could not have followed us in this groundbreaking revolution we are leading.

Please note that the most qualified among you may participate to the development of some features that were not considered release-critical for VHFFS 365, such as e.g. encryption of storage and all inter-nodes transmissions and more generally everything related to security.

Therefore, no time to waste! To your routers and keyboards to make TuxFamily the new reference of free hosting for free people! Please find below the planned agenda, take it into account to complete your facilities within delays:

• April 1st, 2013 : VHFFS 365 public announcement.
• April 3rd, 2013 : Release of technical details to join the CloudFamily.
• May 1st, 2013 : Addition of first nodes -- beginning of the coexistence phase between the former infrastructure and the new one.
• End of May, 2013 : Eviction of potential refractory hostees.
• June 4th, 2013 : Decommissioning of the former infrastructure.
• Early 2016 : Extra developments related to platform security.

Note: Until the end of security-related developments, the whole resulting platform will be placed under the protection of the leader in the domain of Security-as-a-Service, namely CloudFlare.

The TuxFamily.org team

Edit: Of course it was our yearly April fool joke ;-)