User:Gregology/Bur.st networking

Bur.st is a community ISP offering various Internet services including email, web hosting, unix shell access, and DNS services. Bur.st was founded in August 1998 by Paul Day and incorporated as a not-for-profit community association on the 23rd of October, 2003.

Committee
The most recent committee was elected in 2006 and consists of :
 * Joshua Stewart (Chairman)
 * Andrew Francis (Secretary)
 * Simon Chalmers (Treasurer)
 * Trent Lloyd
 * Daniel Martin
 * Rob Morgan

Planed closure
In early 2012 Bur.st announced on it's website and by email that operations will be shutting down as of 27 March 2012 due to lack of funding.

Closure
In June 2012 Bur.st Networking posted the following message on http://bur.st

Bur.st Update

As you may recall from previous news emails, Bur.st Networking Inc. no longer receives sufficient donations to offer its services. Members of the committee have spent over $3000 of their own money since August 2011 to keep the service running, which is not sustainable. As a direct result of this, the West Australian Internet Association (WAIA) kindly offered to take over providing Bur.st's services, and is already hosting our servers at no cost while we work to make this happen. WAIA was founded in 1995, operates the West Australian Internet Exchange (WAIX), and has full-time technical staff. Some existing Bur.st volunteers are also going to stick around and give WAIA a hand keeping things running.

After a transition period which will end on 30th June, WAIA will be requiring users to become members of WAIA in order to continue to use the Bur.st services. WAIA is committed to educating the public on the Internet and offers many services to the Internet community. Your membership means WAIA initiatives such as free member public meetings, conferences, arbitration, and increased member services can continue (such as the new offering of Bur.st-like services to members, but it needs your support if the services are to be viable!)

Individual people may obtain WAIA Professional membership, which costs $50 per year. For further details on how to sign up to WAIA please visit https://www.waia.asn.au/membership

A big advantage of WAIA's taking over is continuity - you won't need to set up your website or email address anywhere else, @bur.st email addresses will continue to work, etc. If there is sufficient demand for Bur.st / WAIA hosting in the future, WAIA expects to overhaul the service a bit, particularly to make it easier to manage. However, we expect the functionality that most Bur.st users are using to remain intact. (One significant exception: we do not expect WAIA to continue to provide shell access.)

If your preference is not to continue these services as offered by WAIA, and you would like to explore other alternatives then the below non-exhaustive list of companies may be able to assist:

A full list of other WAIA Members, who may offer similar services is also available at: https://www.waia.asn.au/membership/current
 * Hostaway has been a long-time supporter of Bur.st), and offers a great range of colocation, virtual servers and domain hosting options.
 * Fasthit - a great range of domain hosting options
 * iiNet - a great range of domain hosting options
 * Google Apps - a great range of domain hosting options

Final sign off

Further updates will be communicated from WAIA in the future. As always, we thank you for your support, albeit small or large, over the many years of Bur.st's existence. And to all those people who have assisted in some way (you know who you are!) - our hats off to you for your dedication to a great not-for-profit organisation.

- Bur.st Executive Committee & Staff