Fosshost

» see fosshost.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Fosshost existed to solve a dull and genuine problem. Open source projects need somewhere to build and somewhere to distribute from, and the ones without a corporate sponsor behind them have to find that somewhere for free. Founded in 2020 and registered as a community interest company in England and Wales under number 13356530, Fosshost took donated capacity from hosting sponsors and handed it out to projects at no charge, run by volunteers.

It worked, and it grew faster than its structure could carry. By December 2021 roughly 250 projects were running on it, and the names were not small ones. GNOME used it. So did Debian, Armbian and the Free Software Foundation Europe. The homepage in late 2022 was still describing reliable global hosting infrastructure spanning multiple regions, all of it free, all of it thanks to sponsors and volunteers.

Underneath that, everything ran through one person. Thomas Markey, the founder and chief executive, held sole access to the bank accounts that paid the bills and to the arrangements with the data center. When he stopped responding around the middle of 2022, there was no mechanism by which anybody else could pay an invoice or touch a machine. Applications were suspended in September. In November the Chicago node became unreachable. The volunteers kept trying to raise him for six months.

Then they stopped trying and started telling people to leave.

~ the dossier ~

~ three titles in six days ~

The homepage's title tag changed three times in under a week, and read in order it is the whole collapse without any commentary needed.

On 29 November 2022 it is still "Fosshost - Free Cloud Computing Resources for the Open Source Community", the ordinary marketing page. On 2 December it is "Fosshost.org - We are doomed", and the body underneath reads: "Welcome to our doomsday. This is only the start but we the remaining volunteers have run out of options as services continue to go offline. If you're still using our services, please MIGRATE AWAY IMMEDIATELY." On 3 December it is "Fosshost.org to be considered end-of-lifed", a formal notice apologizing and recommending that all tenants back up their data and move. By 8 December it has become "Fosshost to Sunset Tenant Services", and the page now carries a message from the founder about the challenges the organization had faced.

~ the single point of failure ~

The technical term for what happened to Fosshost is the one its own community used afterward, and it is usually applied to servers rather than to people. An organization that had spent two years teaching projects not to depend on a single machine had quietly arranged itself so that every bank account and every supplier relationship depended on one individual.

Nothing about this required bad faith to go wrong, and nobody has ever established that there was any. A volunteer nonprofit with a founder who burns out or simply walks away is an ordinary outcome. The failure was in building something 250 projects relied on without ever giving a second person the ability to pay a bill.

~ what grew back ~

The replacement started before the funeral. As the failure became visible, former volunteers and others began assembling alternatives, and the Fosshost end-of-life page itself pointed at The Radix Project, which offers free needs-based hosting for open source work and was founded in part by one of the original technical architects of Fosshost. The large tenants had the easiest time of it, since GNOME and Debian have other infrastructure and other sponsors. The small projects did the scrambling.

fosshost.org itself is gone. Through 2025 the domain served a parking lander and today it times out on https and returns an empty reply on http. The name was picked up by somebody else: fosshost.com is now a hosting-comparison site that explains, accurately and in the third person, that the original Fosshost operated from 2020 to 2022 and shut down. A charity for free hosting became a page that sells you hosting, which is about as neat a reversal as this corpus offers.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »