A lot of philosophers might want server space, but don’t want to shell out the money. I’m talking about real server space where you can do anything you want without the sorts of restrictions and bandwidth limitations that universities might place on the free stuff they give you.
There’s a lot of cool things you can do with server space besides have your own domain name, or install your favorite CMS like WordPress and have a blog/homepage.
With server space and Zotero you can set up a Web Disk and sync not just your bibliographies, but actual electronic copies of the journal articles. With server space, you can experiment with offering the philosophical community awesome services like Phil Papers or Sympoze (if I may say so myself). If people get to install instances of Google Wave, you’d be able to do that with server space. Pretty soon individuals will be able to set up their own clouds for cloud computing with upcoming versions of Ubuntu. Philosophers could have their own private cloud with HUGE amounts of storage space, if they only had a server.
Bottomline: There’s a lot of cool stuff to do for yourself and the philosophical community if you have server space.
Problem: Why step into these costly waters alone? Getting server space might be prohibitively expensive, if you have to shell out the full price of server space plus domain registration.
Answer: Start some kind of philosophy server space co-op
For most purposes, philosophers don’t need nearly the amount of space/bandwidth that most hosting services provide. This could easily be divided up among philosophers. Why not band together?
12 philosophers could each get a folder on a server to do whatever they want for about $5-$10 a year each. Depending on what the philosophers were up to, you could get way more on a single server account.
If you’re a philosopher and you’re reading this, is this something that would interest you?
Yes.
Neat idea. I’m might be up for something like that.
Great idea, Andy. I might be a bit too geeky for this – I kind of need a whole server to myself – but I think it could be really useful to a lot of people. A couple thoughts:
– I’ve recently started using Slicehost for a project I’m doing at work. Instead of renting a specific box located somewhere, you get a VM in Slicehost’s cloud. There are some big advantages to this. 1) You’re not screwed if your particular machine dies; 2) Pricing as compared to dedicated servers of similar size is generally cheaper; 3) It’s very easy to expand (by tacking on another “slice”) if more power or space is needed.
– You’d have to think about what level of freedom each co-op member would have. Entire VMs provide the most freedom but also require the most geekiness and work. Shared accounts (where everything runs off a single OS, installation of PHP, MySQL, etc) are much easier for users, but this kind of setup requires one of the members to be a sysadmin, making sure that the OS is up-to-date, that one member’s software doesn’t interfere with anyone else’s, etc. Someone might do this out of the goodness of their heart, but it it also might worth thinking about factoring in a little beer-money-for-the-sysadmin into the co-op costs.