How about this idea, a 'friends of HN server' ?
jacquesm: Wow, I'm really quite surprised at the negative sentiment, that's not what I expected.1) the world is a lot bigger than just the 'affluent' portions of it, in some countries 3 to 5 bucks per month is a big deal, this server will cost a fairly large multiple of that. If you can get a server with these specs for 3 to 5 bucks I'd like to know where.2) this is a fairly serious server, not some rinkydink slicehost, you could use it to get to a reasonable amount of traffic before you'd have to scale up (if you took some care at making things efficient)3) most of the 'free' alternatives are just as 'free' as gmail, they require some amount of lock-in, this idea is a fully functional 'you've got root' (or at least the sysadmin will) server.4) Nobody gets to be locked in to any hosting contracts but me, the bill is mine, the people that use this server host there for exactly $0 plus a promise to try and make a go of it.5) hcoop gives you 1 GB of disk space and a few GB of data transfer per month for $5. This box has 500 G of disk space (so, let's say it's 5 'tenants' that's 100G per project), and 30T worth of traffic for $0.