CGHMN Hosting
One of the headline features of the early web was users being able to host their own websites. This was typically accomplished through services such as Geocities, free webhosting from your ISP or other large organizations such as universities.
Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net's network design makes it fairly trivial for users of sufficient technical capacity to host their own sites and services. Indeed many users already do just that. Either running websites, game servers or other things that fit their interests.
This page acts to document the types of services offered by CGHMN and how users may access them.
Domain Registration
CGHMN in one of its many branching roles functions as a root DNS server. What that means in a technical sense is outside the scope of this document. But for the end-user it means that if you want a website, we can handle gluing a domain name (such as "cursedsilicon.retro") to an IP address your service is running on.
CGHMN offers .retro as the "defacto" domain extension (TLD) for use on the network. This was chosen both to fit the scope of the project and to provide a domain that would not cause real-world DNS lookup issues. There is also .cghmn for services core to CGHMN itself. However these domains are rare as most infrastructure is run by members and staff of the project, rather than directly run by the network.
If you would like to get your own domain(s) for running services on CGHMN's network. You will need to email domains@cghmn-mail.retro from inside the CGHMN network. If you don't have an email address, you can register a free email account at http://cghmn-mail.retro/register and then email us.
In the email simply put a list of domain names and IP addresses you want the domains to correspond to. An example might look like
cursedsilicon.retro 100.96.52.3 runescape2.retro 100.96.52.7 classic.runescape.retro 100.96.52.5
This email inbox is monitored semi-regularly by the CGHMN Staff. Once we've read the email we'll make an effort to action the changes and email you with a reply letting you know. DNS updates may take a few hours to propagate. Particularly if you require changes after the domain is registered.
Bring Your Own TLD
One of the benefits of running our own "retro internet" service is that we're (largely) un-burdened by the constraints of the regular web. While "classic" domains such as .com, .net .org etc are reserved and will not be delegated to a user. Custom TLD's are available for use if the user would like to have their own domain name extension.
This allows for a greater degree of user freedom and customization. Examples of custom TLD's include ChivaNet who own the chivanet TLD. Typing www.chivanet will take you to their main website.
The caveat to this is that custom TLD's are expected to be hosted and handled entirely by the end user. Our DNS server (BIND) will return your custom TLD's DNS server in requests. But the availability and domains running on it are expected to be handled by the user who owns the TLD. We do not promise (nor expect of the user) any reliability of these custom TLD's. We simply make the functionality available for use.
If you would like to request your own TLD. Please email dns@cghmn-mail.retro from inside the CGHMN network. If you don't have an email address, you can register a free email account at http://cghmn-mail.retro/register and then email us. We'll work with you to verify your DNS server compatibility with modern BIND (not all servers are compatible out of the box, such as Windows Server DNS) and integrate it with the CGHMN DNS network.
Server hosting
At this time we do not (currently) have the resources to host websites or other servers for members. There is a desire to eventually offer this as a "paid" service where members (likely via Patreon?) will gain access to a Proxmox server and IP block which they can spin up as many virtual servers as they desire up to a fixed quota of CPU/Memory/Hard disk. This service will be offered at cost of physically hosting the server in order to make it as cheap for users as possible