Polarhome

Polarhome.com is non commercial, educational effort for popularization of shell enabled operating systems and Internet services, offering shell accounts, e-mail and other online services on all available systems (Linux, OpenVMS, Solaris, AIX, QNX, IRIX, HP-UX, Tru64, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD). Plan9 and OPENSTEP are coming soon.

Polarhome.com is an independent, self managed, free community.

History

Polarhome was open to the public in Spring 2000 by Zoltan Arpadffy in an aim to provide free shell account, e-mail, and webhosting services with PHP engine, MySQL database and CGI scripting for public use. Users can feel and compare the differences between operating systems, in order to make better professional decisions in future, improving the Internet quality in general.

October 3rd, 2001 polarhome.com came to a dead-end of free shell providing activity. Free shell access was abused; therefore polarhome.com divided ftp access from shell access and came up with a new user policy.

* template account: is free - usable in about 4-8 minutes after registration.
* shell account: requires a symbolic, one time fee that costs 10 local currency units per username (per host) - but at least 2 USD value (in case the value of 10 local curency units is less than 2 USD), that should be sent to polarhome.com with the correctly filled and signed application form. Very simple principle, intentionally created to suit to everybody but avoid abuse at the same time.

Year 2005, Polarhome has more than 100.000 registered accounts on 14 servers.

August 2005: Due to further abuse of free ftp accounts, free accounts are now limited to e-mail template accounts only, with the possibility of upgrading, after a suitable probation period, to shell accounts.

Polarhome is based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Projects hosted on Polarhome

* Vim - text editor - OpenVMS
* eggdrop - IRC bot - AIX
* ctags - text utility - OpenVMS
* Usermin - Web Administration tool - QNX, OPENSTEP
* Ghostscript - an interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF - AIX
* Anope - Anope IRC Services (Charles Kingsley QA) uses Polarhome's extensive network for development testing and bug tracking.

External links

* [http://www.polarhome.com Polarhome Website]