Hosting provision

Work in progress

Website

Originally hosting provision for our groups was on the free facility provided by Yahoo Groups.

We then moved over a number of years from Yahoo to Freegle Direct (www.ilovefreegle.org) with hosting eventually being provided free of charge from Bytemark for the bulk of it, plus discount hosting from Mythic Beasts, and cloud services such as Microsoft Azure (where we have a free charity quota), and some use of Google Cloud.

In February 2023, Bytemark regretfully notified us that they couldn't offer their free hosting any longer, so we ran an appeal to members to raise funding for a new hosting provision. (message to volunteers explaining https://discourse.ilovefreegle.org/t/bad-news-our-free-hosting-is-going/5892)

We provided an explanation sheet of our needs - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vpahMPTS73s29-c-2yeEmo1ul78BsIfKGyCnRAEia8w/edit - and sent Admins to all members and appealed via social media.

Text of Admin message sent to all members:

ADMIN: Urgent Help Needed
Freegle has run into trouble - our free web hosting is being withdrawn. To keep going, we need 200 people across the UK to set up regular donations of £10/month. Could you be one of them?
What’s going on?
The majority of our web hosting, which keeps us online, has been provided for free for many years by a company called Bytemark. Unfortunately they are no longer able to keep doing this. They’re not the bad guys - ten years of free support has been massive for us, and we have nothing but gratitude.
We’re looking for other free support - but we use quite specialised web hosting, not your standard freebie Wordpress site. The charge that we could be looking at, even with charity discounts, is an amount we simply can’t afford each month.
We need your help. If we could get 200 “server heroes” across the UK to set up regular £10 monthly donations, then we could cover the likely cost and give us breathing space. If more people set up smaller donations, that would work too. But it’s the regular donations that we need.
We appreciate times are tough at the moment - which is precisely why we need to keep going. We have 4 million members across the UK, hundreds of volunteers, and deliver over £10 million of savings to freeglers each year. We want to keep helping people who need it.
Any help will be gratefully received.
Many thanks,
Your Freegle volunteers
Donate here: https://freegle.in/paypal10

March 2023:

Krystal UK have provided support to us in using their Katapult platform, which now replaces our use of Bytemark.

We have a not-that-well-drawn Architecture Diagram. Click the link to see the most up to date version.

Modtools

Run initially by Edward, the hosting of Modtools was transferred to the same hosting facilities as the website.

Central Discussion Groups

Like the rest of Freegle, we ran our national volunteer discussion groups on Yahoo. With the demise of Yahoo Groups, it was decided to use another forum facility - Discourse.