The Server tier puts the whole platform on a machine of your own. It is the tier for organisations — a company, a publisher, a university department, an association — that want a space of their own: blogs, forums, sites for projects and for people, inside one system they control. An individual author or merchant does not need it: Business and Creative already allow as many domains as the work requires, under an ordinary panel subscription. Below is what running your own installation actually means.
What the host controls
- Who joins. You decide whether the installation is open to anyone or to an invited circle, and you hand out the tiers below Server to the people inside it.
- What it is about. A server can be a town, a trade, a genre of books, a language, a hobby — the software does not assume a topic.
- The rules. Moderation, publishing policy, what is allowed. The foundation writes software, not community law.
- The advertising. If there is any, you sell it. Nobody takes a share of what your community earns, and no house advertising is injected into your pages.
- The data. It sits in a database on your machine. You can back it up, move it, or take it elsewhere.
What the foundation does
We develop the software and keep it working: the engine, the panel, the templates, the search-related plumbing. Improvements arrive for every installation, so a server does not drift into an unmaintainable fork the way a custom-built site usually does.
What we do not do: the foundation neither hosts your installation nor moderates it, takes no percentage of what it earns, and does not sit between you and your members. The machine is normally your own — the platform goes on the hosting your organisation already uses and stays your infrastructure; buying hosting from the platform side is possible, but it is an extra option, not the way the tier works. If the foundation disappeared tomorrow, an installed server would keep running.
What it costs and what it takes
Server is priced case by case. There is no list price and there should not be one: what it comes to depends on what you want built and how much work that turns out to be. It is agreed with the regional representative serving your market (shopnseo.ru or qwetru.ru) — the foundation is not a party to it.
Technically it needs a cloud VPS of modest size, a domain name, and someone willing to look after it — the same skills as running any small server. If nobody inside the organisation has them, one of the partner studios installs and sets it up for a fee, and routine maintenance can be arranged with them separately. Both are paid work, and both are separate from the software itself.
What a server looks like when it runs
The clearest example is qwetru.ru: one installation carrying dozens of sites — shops, studios, personal pages — each with its own domain, its own owner and its own content. See the platform and live sites for the full map, or start a community for the practical steps.