NOOOOOOOO

[sethg at ropine.com (Seth Gordon)]

Mark J. Dulcey wrote:
> But then where do we go? I'm not thrilled about a future where my only
> service choices are from companies that won't let me run my own servers,
> block ports at their whim, cut off customers based on unpublished
> criteria, and don't guarantee to offer free and equal access to any
> sites that I choose to visit. The Internet that Verizon and Comcast want
> to offer isn't the Internet that I want to be a part of; my Internet
> doesn't have second-class citizens, which is the only sort that they
> want to allow me to be.

I used to have residential DSL service from Speakeasy, with my domain's
mail and Web services being hosted out of a machine in my basement.
Now, I have residential DSL service from Verizon and a virtual server at
OpenHosting.  As long as Verizon doesn't block outgoing ssh connections,
I can do whatever I want on the "real Internet" through OpenHosting; I
have root on the virtual server, it's running Postfix, it's running
Apache, etc., etc.  OpenHosting does a better job keeping their servers
up and running and backed up than I was doing with my own, so I don't
miss having physical access to my server.

Best of all (and this is why I made the switch from Speakeasy to Verizon
in the first place), the sum of my Verizon DSL and OpenHosting bills is
less than what I was paying Speakeasy.

(Would it be practical for BLU to lease a box at some colocated site,
set up Xen/UML/VServer/whatever on it, and then sublease virtual machine
instances to BLU members?)


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