Thoughts on u3acommunities hosting

I’m thinking we should migrate u3acommunities from stackcp / hand made pages to something better. I’ll be updating this page as ideas occur – actual work won’t start until winter time.

Drop me a mail (peter@plord.co.uk) if you have any thoughts or feature requests.

Current issues

  • Original funding from Tom Holloway has been exhausted (expires Feb 2027)
  • Routing email through u3acommunities with our membership levels hits limits (so we currently route through plord.co.uk + smtp2go). Full routing through a paid provider gets expensive quickly.
  • Can be slow
  • No support for running server applications (see below)
  • No notifications when things go wrong (out of funding / ssh disabled)
  • Did have certain IP address blocked and couldn’t fix
  • Mailpoet will exceed free plan subscriber limits at some point
  • Mailpoet editing is clunky and auto emails arn’t a good match to monthly meetings (eg can’t simply send an email 4 days before the event starts)

High level thinking

Phase 1

  • Find new hosting platform that more closely matches our current needs
    • DNS management
    • Web hosting – initially wordpress as-is (unless alternative works well quickly)
    • Email list routing – initially through mailpoet as-is
    • Group email management (ie group leaders)
    • Easy management (install, changes, logs, backups, IP blocking etc) – eg https://yunohost.org (useful guide here https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-with-yunohost/)
    • Easy to expand (add more memory / cpus / applications)
    • Document and use as a basis for a new computing group talk
    • Donation links
    • Protections against webscraping & AI agents
      • fail2ban (for all logs)
      • Anubis (and disable capachas)
      • Obviously firewall configurations to block all be necessary ports (eg expect to allow ssh only via my home IP)

Some hosting platforms to look at

https://european-alternatives.eu/category/vps-virtual-private-server-hosters?ref=blog.elenarossini.com

Phase 2

  • Explore new features & alternatives
    • Mailpoet alternative (easier to send emails)
    • WordPress alternative (ghost?)
    • Running event generation
    • u3a.social (friendica + email)
    • Better video conferencing
    • Video storage (peertube?)
    • Office, eg host our slides (onlyoffice?)
    • ….
  • Funding via Jean & George Taylor