Firing up amigamirror.com in the shadow of GeoCities' death

[LoadWB]

For the past few years I have been planning on a web site for the Amiga community, amigamirror.com.  The idea was that I would set up a mirror site for Amiga-oriented web sites offering downloads and what-not.

I noticed that there are a lot of Amiga and Commodore on GeoCities, which will be allowed to die very very soon.  It would be a shame to lose that information, even though it might be able to find that stuff in the way-back machine.

My idea was to run the site on an 68060-powered Amiga 2000 running NetBSD, with an Apache proxy in front to reduce the load on the machine.  Unfortunately, time constraints and lack of hardware funds left me holding just a plan.  With GeoCities running aground for the last time, it occurred to me that it might be time to go ahead and move forward without my 2000/060 back-end.

Along the way I decided that I would not just offer a mirror, but a free hosting site for Amiga enthusiasts.  I have not ironed out the final details just yet, and with finals next week I will not be doing so right away, but by mid-May I will be ready to roll.  I considered doing a GeoCities-type approach, such as amigamirror.com/place/site, or site.amigamirror.com, or custom domain hosting.  Ideas on this are welcome, and I can accommodate all of them.

First, I would like to solicit anyone running an Amiga or Commodore-oriented web site on GeoCities.  I have also registered commodoremirror.com to be more appropriate for the Commodore stuff :-)  I will work with priority for those who will be losing their GeoCities presence.  Bear in mind, however, that I will not (at least at first) be offering any kind of development tools or dashboard, and access will be via FTP/SFTP only.

The second phase of my Devilishly Cunning Plan (tm) will launch sometime around June.

I don't have coding talents or time to offer to the Amiga community.  I honestly don't have a lot other than my services as a reliable technologist and hosting provider.

Anyone interested, please PM with your site information.  I will be back with you as quickly as I can.

[LoadWB]

Why old hardware?

As I stated in my original post, the idea was to run the back-end on Amiga hardware, an 060-based Amiga 2000 running NetBSD, for the "authenticity."  It was to be proxied by a front-end server to reduce the load.  But, as already stated, this design will not happen right now, if ever.  I will not discuss this any further than already provided.


What will be offered?

Nothing more than what was being offered by GeoCities, et al.  The idea is not to compete with forums or existing Amiga organizations, but to offer a place to dump static sites which would otherwise be tossed out when the last GeoCities server is dumped unceremoniously like Q-Link was.  In fact, I do not want to run yet another Amiga forum when there are plenty of good ones already out there.  There are a number of sites with historical references and information, tribute pages, etc.  Someone obviously felt the time was worthwhile to put them together, and I do not see any reason to let them just disappear.


Why use this over other free sites?

Why not?  Aside from that, because I give a shyt.  How many big corporate sites have tossed their free projects to the wind?

[LoadWB]

ASCII by Jason Scott / Geocities: Lessons So Far