In December 2020, we reached out to Fosshost to assist our Free Software/Open Source project with some extra infrastructure muscle. The Chamilo project is supported by official providers, but the Chamilo Association is not self-sustainable *enough* yet to have its own continuous development/continuous integration servers while at the same time providing a high load Free-for-All Chamilo campus (with more than 580k users and 53k courses). Counting with some testing infrastructure is important: we need a place where some of our very active community members can check the latest developments integrated into Chamilo and help Chamilo developers improve them before they are released to the public in a new version. When resources are limited, testing portals can be slow, discouraging users to actually test and give us critical feedback, which can translate into unsufficiently-tested features that make their way into a stable release and get underwhelming acceptation. With better infrastructure, this would be a non-issue. This is where Fosshost comes in!
Fosshost is a project supported by sponsoring organizations (usually hosting companies) to support Open Source software communities in their infrastructure needs. The process to ask for support is simple: fill the form at https://fosshost.org/apply and wait (not long) until they contact you for more information. If you Open Source project is legit and your needs match what Fosshost can provide, you're good to go! This translates in the Fosshost team providing you access to a virtual machine on an infrastructure close to you in a few days. Take that machine over and setup your own web (or other) server, and boost your Open Source project! It's that easy.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Fosshost team for their support. This will enable testing portals for both Chamilo 1.11 and Chamilo 2.0 to be fast and get much better beta-users feedback, which will result in improved quality of our releases.
Fosshost.org is a non-profit organisation that works with the open source community and projects to provide free hosting services. These services ensure that projects can continue to develop, maintain and contribute to the overall open source ecosystem, solving matters relating to sustainability, social justice and ensuring those from under represented groups across society, have access to world-class hosting facilities, that would normally be out of the equation.