Moonlet

[Sean Alexandre]

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Moonlet
>From http://moonlet.is/:
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Moonlet will be a small scale personal cloud services collective. Our goal is
to pool together about 20-40 peoples' resources to pay for the hosting and
sysadmin time necessary to replace most or all of the cloud services we use
with ones we can trust.

Our goals are:
* To offer cloud-replacement services at a reasonable price to members
* Security and privacy are primary priorities
* Ensure a useable and well-integrated solution that replicates the hassle-free
  convenience of the better existing cloud services
* Document the process clearly so other people can replicate the experience

Why

The impetus for this is twofold:

First, cloud providers are proving unreliable in terms of continued provision
of services and respect for user privacy.

Second, paying for it on one's own is either expensive in terms of time, or
money. Almost all the software exists to duplicate all the cloud offerings one
might want to use, but getting it up and working is time consuming.  Current
status

As of June 2013, we are actively recruiting members to get this collective
started. When we have enough people able to commit to a year of membership, we
will set definitive pricing for the first year, hire an administrator and
announce a launch date.  How to get involved...

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Moonlet FAQ
>From http://eldan.co.uk/moonlet/faq.html
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We are currently recruiting members. When we have enough people, we anticipate
creating a legal entity to hold money, hire the sysadmin and so on. This will
probably be a co-op, though details are to be confirmed. Everything that
follows will be shaped by the needs of the group.  Service set

This set will evolve as we get feedback from members, but it will look something like:
* Email, with a solid webmail interface and IMAPS (GMail)
* Caldav, with a web calendar interface (Google Calendar)
* Secure online https file share (Dropbox/etc.)
* Encrypted backup, based on Tahoe-LAFS (Dropbox/etc.)
* VPN Endpoint
* Hosted to-do list (RTM/Google calendar tasks)
* XMPP/Jabber (Google Talk)
* VM instances (personal web hosting/other private services)
* Secured etherpad lite instance (Google docs)
* Shell access within VMs
* Hosted RSS reader (Google Reader)
* Hosted photo sharing (Flickr)
* Hosted wordpress instances (Blogger/etc.)
* Status.net instance (Twitter)
* SIP server, with assistance in configuring ZRTP (Skype)
* Wiki instances (PBWiki/etc.)
* Hosted bookmarking tool (Del.icio.us/Pininterest)
* Local configuration of hosted services (not tech support)
* Configuration of mobile devices

As we learn which are most important to people, and what the resource needs
& prerequisites are for some, we will decide which to include at launch, add
later or drop.

For some things, for instance etherpad lite, we may decide to offer a feature
bounty as a group to developers to make the software a better replacement -- in
that case, to support a bit more formatting, for working on more complex
documents. Some stuff, like getting a mobile device working without any public
cloud accounts, may take some time and integration research, but in general,
we're targeting a relatively tech-savvy audience, at least to start with. If
you've already got a lot of this stuff set up, the benefit for you is that you
get to not think about it any more.  Hosting

Tentatively, the primary hosting location will be Iceland because of its
favorable legal jurisdiction and good international connectivity. We are
considering a second jurisdiction for redundancy, potentially in the
Netherlands. Unfortunately for North Americans, nowhere on our continent is
suitable.

The server(s) will be running appropriately hardened Linux installs with
services segmented into VMs and encrypted physical disks and backups, etc.
We'll probably recruit both a primary and a backup admin, for human fault
tolerance.  Costs

Exact pricing will depend on both the number of people who join and the exact
costs for sysadmin time and hosting. We anticipate a range of EUR50-100 per
month, with a strong impetus to reach the lower end of the range. If costs come
in higher than expected we may recruit a larger number of members to spread the
burden.

We generally favor simplicity in pricing, but may have to itemize charges for
services that are costly to provide and used at wildly varying rates by
different individuals - most likely backup beyond a modest initial disk quota.
Discounts

We are considering asking initial members to pay for a year of service in
advance, to help handle setup costs, in exchange for which we will offer
a discount. We anticipate prices dropping after all services have been rolled
out, but can not guarantee this.

We will offer some sort of group discount, but are figuring out details. If you
have suggestions for how to take advantage of group signups to streamline the
admin work, please let us know - the more we can achieve that, the bigger
a group discount it makes sense to offer.  Questions, suggestions? ...