Websites hosted by The Fertile Soil

As part of our mission to make technology and education free and accessible, The Fertile Soil offers free website and email hosting to our members and partner organizations. If your website or email lives on our servers, this post explains what that actually means, what you’re getting, and the steps we take behind the scenes to make sure it all keeps working.

What We Provide

When we host your website and email, here’s what’s included:

• Your own private space.
  Every website we host gets its own separate account on our server. Your site’s files, email, and settings are kept apart from everyone else’s, so no one else’s website or account can ever reach into yours.
• Website hosting.
  We keep your website’s files, images, and database running and available to visitors around the clock, the same as a paid commercial host would.
• Professional email.
  If you want it, we can set up email addresses that use your own domain name (like you@yourorganization.org) instead of a generic address. You can check that email from any device using a simple web based inbox, or connect it to an email app the same way you would with any other email account.
• Security certificates.
  Every website and every mailbox we host is issued its own security certificate. This is what puts the little padlock next to your website’s address in a browser, and it is what allows email programs to trust that a message claiming to be from your domain is actually from your domain.
• Automatic offsite backups.
  Every night, a full backup of your website and email is copied automatically to separate backup storage, away from the server your site actually runs on. If something ever went wrong with the server itself, your content is not sitting in the same place as the problem.

How We Make Sure It’s All Actually Working

Setting something up once is easy. Making sure it keeps working is the part that actually matters, so we regularly go through the same checklist for every site and mailbox we host:

• We visit every website
  and confirm it loads properly and shows a secure, padlocked connection, not just most of the time, but every time.
• We check every security certificate
  for the website and for email, confirming each one is valid, correctly matched to the right domain name, and not about to expire. Certificates like these typically need to be renewed every few months, so we track their expiration dates and renew them well ahead of time rather than waiting for something to break.
• We test email delivery
  for every domain with active mailboxes, confirming mail can actually be sent and received, and that the domain’s mail settings correctly point to our server rather than to an old host from before you moved to us. This last one matters more than people expect: it is common for a domain that switched hosts to still have a few old settings pointing at the previous provider, quietly causing mail to disappear.
• We confirm webmail access works
  for every domain with a mailbox, including the simple shortcut address (yourdomain.org/webmail) that gets you straight to your inbox from a browser.
• We confirm backups actually happened
  and landed in the correct offsite location, rather than just assuming the backup system is doing its job.
• We double check account boundaries,
  making sure every website’s files are owned only by that website’s own account, with nothing left over from setup that could blur the line between one member’s site and another’s.
• We review each domain’s technical settings,
  the equivalent of an address book entry that tells the internet where your website and email actually live, and clean up anything left over from a previous host that could cause confusion later.

None of this requires you to do anything on your end. It’s simply the standard of care that comes with hosting through The Fertile Soil: not just free hosting, but hosting that’s actually looked after.

If you run a small site of your own somewhere else and want to hold your host to a similar standard, this checklist is a reasonable one to ask about.

Organizations We Host

We freely host local organizations that are making the world a better place for all of us. Please support them as we do.

	The Plant Auntie Plants are personal. Your care should be too.
	Max’s Auto Service Fixing autos for our friends.
	LULABS AI consulting for us.
	Amharic Press Teaching Amharic to students of all ages.
	Stainable Ink Fully-sustainable t-shirt and silk screening with education and outreach.
	Jacqui Naylor Singing love in to your soul.
	This Needs Salt Food prepared with a pinch of sarcasm.