💾 Archived View for benjaminja.com › log › 2024 › 06 › 09-plan-gemini-host captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:00:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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2024-06-09
I have an idea for a project that I’m pretty excited about and I think it could be very helpful to the gemini community. I’ve started building it, but I realized that I should get peoples opinions before I go any further. I would love to hear from you, whether that be through a post response, or a direct message.
Even though gemini is a very simple protocol and can be created with ease, you still need some technical expertise to set up a server. There are of course groups which allow you to have your own capsule directory such as [gemlog.blue], [bbs.geminispace.org]. [Or you could join a pubnix.]
These are all great alternatives to having your own domain, but I haven’t seen any service that would provide simple hosting for your own domain. My project is to provide gemini hosting without needing to know all the technical things about hosting.
There will be two ways to manage your website. One way will be through the https portal which runs with htmx and fails safely if js is disabled. You will also be able to manage your capsule through gemini/titan.
I really want this to be a robust system, so I am building it in the cloud with AWS. Since AWS doesn’t know what gemini is, I will have to be using one of their EC2 VPS to host the gemini side of things. I’ve thought about going serverless for the web server, but that really does just over complicate everything; especially when I’m trying make a service that is server-side rendered. So instead, everything will live on the EC2 instance.
I’ve done some estimations about how much it will cost me to host this server, and it seems that right now, it will cost about $14/month. I think there are some cost saving measures that can be done to reduce cost of this. I’m using a t4g.nano instance which should cost $3/month. Most of the costs seem to be coming from the VPC at around $10/month with $3 for a public IP and $7 for endpoints to S3, and DynamoDb. There might be ways to reduce the cost of the VPC, but I don’t really know what would be needed to do.
One of the more controversial things that I expect to come from this service is pricing. I don’t want to make a profit on this project, but I also don’t want to be losing money. I feel like I could charge $1/month to host a gemini server for anyone, and scale up the service horizontally to provide lower latencies across countries as more people join. There are a few problems that I immediately see with charging people for hosting.
¹ I’m realizing that this not possible because of how complex regulations are around credit card transactions.
I could also run the service off of donations. I think this would be the preferable option, however it does not scale well. I can’t imagine there would be enough donations to keep everything running when there are a million users (There will never be that many people or I’ll eat my hat).
Maybe there could be a compromise where everyone owes $1/month, but donations get distributed randomly between users Twitch Gift Sub style. Or donations could go directly to specific people. If there are enough donations to cover the costs of the servers, then it would be free for everyone.
I am interested to know how people feel about the idea of this service. Is it something you would want to use if you didn’t already have a place to host your capsule? Are you interested in it enough to transition from your existing service? Does the idea of paying for a gemini capsule sound bad? Do you have a suggestion for how this could be done?
I’ve mostly just put down my thoughts as they’ve come to me. So I hope that my thoughts aren’t too sporadic. I really want gemini to be more accessible to creators and I would like to know what people really want before I go further into the project than I already am.