Let’s raise funds for the development of VPS for Free GNU/Linux distributions!
And this is not a one-sided donation to PURISM, this is a two-sided financial relationship! The benefits will be for both PURISM and the users! Anyone can buy a VPS for $5-7 per month, but not everyone can spend $700 or $2,000 on a computer or phone!
So there would appear to be two specific basic requirements here:
The underlying hardware that hosts the VPSs is libre.
The distros that you can install out of the box on your new VPS include several libre options.
Were Purism to offer a VPS itself, I guess there is a reasonable likelihood that those conditions would be met.
I think there is a legitimate question, as perhaps implied by @FranklyFlawless, that Purism doesn’t have the resources to implement every good idea. So they have to pick and choose regarding how they deploy their resources so that it will generate more resources so that they can provide more products and services, …
You may have other more generic requirements.
Payment methods include libre methods i.e. crypto.
VPS administration infrastructure avoids yukness like trackers and scripts.
Based on past observations I guess there is a reasonable likelihood that #3 will be met and that #4 will not be met. The problem with #4 is that in order to avoid reinventing the wheel, you want to reuse existing open source offerings but some of those may not meet your exacting standards.
As far as price goes
You want it cheap.
That probably won’t be met. The reality is that when you provide a niche product or service, you are not getting the economies of scale of the big boys, and your prices are higher.
One of the things that I like about my VPS providers is the wide choice of locations. Again, that is difficult to compete against if you are just starting out with a niche service, unless you have deep pockets.
Certain questions would also come up regarding boot integrity if the underlying hardware resides at a co-lo data centre - and other questions come up if it doesn’t.
Another direction that Purism could go in is to investigate and certify an existing provider as meeting at least the first two points, and then resell that.
There is no publicly accountable legal contract nor targeted campaign by Purism to provide any confidence/reassurance to potential backers that this exact idea will be followed through to completion, let alone initialization.
Thank you for your opinion, I found it interesting to read.
In the current conditions - a very large number of VPS it is impossible to offer the same thing as they do, this is a losing position, so I created a list that will distinguish you or whoever gets ahead of you from others and most importantly no one has done this yet!
Why did I suggest this idea here on the forum and specifically to your company, the answer is very simple, you produce almost free hardware, only Power9 is better than you but their prices are out of this world)) and you are included in the FSF list as the owners of a free distro!
The idea already exists, so it’s a good start) Time will tell what will happen next…