I’ve recently begun working with a few folks from around the Kalamazoo area to develop a Community Web Hosting program which is intended to be a community-focused alternative to Big Tech hosting platforms that are often both expensive and impersonal.

Instead of forking out your hard-earned cash to Silicon Valley companies who are more than willing to charge you for every little feature while doing everything in their power to prevent you from talking to a human when you need support, I believe that we can pool our knowledge and resources to build web hosting services locally that serve the needs of the community first-and-foremost instead of prioritizing the profits of invisible stakeholders.

This is currently a side project while I still work for Big Tech full-time. Automattic, the company that owns the company I work for, has provided me a generous benefit of paying for my personal hosting costs up to a certain amount so that I can host websites for my family and friends, provided that I don’t charge for any services that would be a conflict of interest with Automattic. That benefit is currently providing us the resources for this project and I am grateful for their support.

We are still very much in the experimentation phase, so I’m not exactly sure what the future holds for this project. However, if this is something that sounds interesting to you, please drop me a line. I’ll be posting more updates as I continue to build out this idea further.