Open Web Hosting?

Okay, so I can’t make up my mind on hosting lately. Unless you get a fully dedicated solution that’s practically hosted on your own server, there’s really not a ton of options out there that satisfy all my needs. Either they have too few options in one area, but lots in another, or they offer lots of options with some other caveat such as only one site can run at a time without paying an arm and a leg. Most of the dedicated solutions out there don’t offer much protection in the event of someone hacking into your server – you’re pretty much on your own. I was charged $500 for a Terabyte of bandwidth I didn’t use on one dedicated server I rented once.

So it got me thinking – I wonder if there is some way groups of geeks like me could share their disk space and bandwidth for others to use in a clustered-server environment. Some things it would need to do:

• detect how much up/down speed is available and being used by each participant so as to not affect their current use of the servers and bandwidth they own
• somehow have multiple mirrors of the data on other participants machines should one not be available
• data would need to be encrypted or inaccessible by anyone but the owner of the data for security
• somehow the browser would need to know which server to send the initial request to
• I’m sure there are many other things I have not even thought of that need to be considered

I’m sure it could be done if enough thought was put into it. For now, I think I’m going to have to sacrifice one thing or another.