As you know.. there is no more free hosting at mg2.org.. after 5+ years of serving the internet. It was a really hard thing to do. There are a few reasons for this.

• We couldn't support enough people
• The user system defined hardware limitations and requirements but did not limit people requirements.
• Nothing scaled. One box. One set of users.
• The mainstream user does not want a shell on a NIX box, they want an easy to use interface
• We couldn't keep the kiddies out
• Our userbase had sites that had been exploited, or were running exploitable software.
• There was no way to allow the freedom that I felt the users deserved, as it'd require that we dictate which software users can run, and keep running tabs on versions. This is an undeserved administrative nightmare for our unpaid-three-member-working-day-jobs-already administration team.
• People loved php too much
• The income and participation did not outweigh the costs associated
• Catching kiddies and disabling exploitable sites takes time
• Buying new hardware costs money
• Hosting costs money
• Running the current versions of important system libraries and services takes time
• Handling user requests takes time
• Less than 10% of our user base donated money or volunteered time to a project
• Less than half of the people who promised time actually followed through
  
• Few participated on the forums
• Few participated in any community building activities
  
• The community aspect was lost I believe because the services provided were the incentive and the benefit. No one needed a community, they just needed free web hosting.

In addition to all of this I'm just getting tired. I'm getting bored. And I'm wanting to persue other things that require my full attention. Including something similar to how mg2 was that could potentially reach the mainstream as mg2 never could. A lot of my ideas that went into the libraries for mg2 v3 never saw the light of day, and I regret that because I think they could have been really really cool. But the emphasis would never have been on the cool community features of mg2 I'm afraid.. only on the free hosting aspects.

I hope some of you stick around in some capacity.. hang out in #mg2 on efnet. We're always there to talk about software development, and chat with our bot. Keep coming back as we're not down and out as far as a company, we're just not offering free web hosting.

To those of you that want to offer free hosting, I wish you luck and I hope that you succeed. Balancing freedom, the demands of users, idiot users, script kiddies, and your own sanity can be a chore. There are way more open source tools available now than there were when I started mg2, so you do have an advantage :). Also, lemme know if you do. I'll sign up for an account in a heartbeat.

Oh and if you're a non profit organization who is being provided services through mg2 or a paying customer.. don't worry. These boxes aren't going anywhere.

Take care, all :)

--_-