Okay, now that I’ve opened up the topic, back to what you were saying, @jesse4216 on the other thread that was getting off-topic:
So one of the things is that I want people to know this is a legit thing. A big problem that I see is that a lot of tech people who don’t care about privacy and trust big companies will piss on any projects that are smaller than Big Companies. So I would think increasing confidence by looking a little bit like a big company’s website would be a good thing.
We have too many words and not enough pictures. People like pictures and things to please their eyes. The current website gets the job done, but it doesn’t really look appealing. I would like to see broadening our horizons to “tech dummies”, so even more people can take advantage of freedom.
I am also thinking about our tutorial system. A mailserver may have costed $12/mo a while ago, but it doesn’t anymore. DigialOcean has blown this figure out of the water. It now costs $5/mo, and you have super cheat top-level-domains (the “.com”, “.net”, “.org”, “.gov” parts of domains, in lamen’s terms) that can cost as little as $1/year.
So I am thinking having super-simple walk-through’s would be beneficial. Maybe do something similar to what big companies like Namecheap and Godaddy do where they entice people to enter a domain they want, then proceed to check if it’s available, but in our case, take them to Namcheap (namecheap has excellent customer service and solid policies (last time I read them) that allow you to switch registrars without any pain), then take them to Vultr (I hear Vultr has better networks, SLA agreements and customer support than Digital Ocean, for the same price) to create an instance.
See my summary for an extra idea:
Summary
Now, I know the easiest way to accomplish the walk-through (on our side) would be tutorial-style, but I would definitely like to eventually see where it works more magically than that (for the end-user), but it would require PCI compliance, as setting up for someone would require taking the payment information, relaying that to Namecheap and Vultr/DigitalOcean, then creating a VPS instance, getting SSH access, running the installation command, then sending the customer access to both services, then making sure we wipe all their information clean from our systems. So there are two major risks with this: security, and making sure the person understands that Mail-in-a-box is not responsible for what happens after everything is set up and deleted on our side.
Now, a benefit from doing the service above is that it magically creates a server and domain that the person wants, which increases Mail-in-a-box’s user base, and while we’re at it, we can ask very nicely for donations. But this is more of a topic for “Adding more support”, since we still need to figure out a legal entity and due process for decisions for Mail-in-a-box.
Anyways, I would start off with trying to put this proposal together. @jesse4216, do you want to private message details to admin access to the server?