Polymaths Pages

Polymaths.social offers free static site hosting for Polymaths.social members.

• To apply, send us an email or contact @amin@polymaths.social. Include your SSH public key (see below) and any custom domains you wish to use.
• You will be provided a <username>.polymaths.page subdomain for your site, or you can bring your own domain.
• You will have SSH access to an unprivileged user on a VPS. Be mindful of others being hosted and don’t hog resources or storage.
• The Code of Conduct is in effect for sites hosted with Polymaths Pages, primarily the “Unacceptable Behavior”. (Some of the “Disallowed Behavior” does not apply, for obvious reasons.) Use your best judgement, and if asked to remove something by Polymaths.social staff, do so.
• No warranties/guarantees of uptime or anything else are implied or provided. This is an experimental service and a labor of love.
• Hosting anything other than static HTML websites will not be possible at this time.
• Only members of Polymaths.social will be considered.

DNS for Custom Domains

Once your account has been created, you will need to point any domains (other than the provided subdomain) at our server. This only takes one DNS record:

• Create a CNAME or ALIAS record with the value polymaths.page. This is simplest; if our server’s IP changes, you will not need to change anything.

Uploading Your Site’s Content

Your home directory on the polymaths.page server will have subdirectories named after each of your domains. Upload files to these subdirectories and they will be served at those domains. (For example, example.com’s files go in $HOME/example.com.)

These tools have been added so far to assist the upload process:

• rsync

Other tools may be installed on the server by request.

We have an example script that simplifies uploading your site’s files.

Generating an SSH Public Key

If you do not already have an SSH key, you can easily generate one with ssh-keygen. For example:

ssh-keygen -o -a 100 -t ed25519

Running this will prompt you for a location and a passphrase, then generate a key. The output will specify the file your “public key” was saved to; for example, the default with the above command is ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub. The contents of this file is what you should send when you apply for a Polymaths Pages account.

Your public key should look something like this:

ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIAmQAt6k/xRBCQS477pYCAeFXFkfJ7BP3mQoOFCgeaph amin@archimedes

Be sure to back up your private key; if you lose it, you will not be able to log into your account. (In this case, contact Amin.)

Adding More Custom Domains

If you want to add more custom domains or subdomains to an existing account, simply contact Amin.