Is there any existing effort in the community to convince hosting companies to support Nix/Nixos?
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@mightyiam @imincik @mat and me are working on a pitch to sponsors these days, currently for a different particular topic. It may be worthwhile exchanging thoughts on the general issue.
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Sorry: what I meant here was: convincing hosting companies to support the installation and usage of nixos as an option on their systems. (although I am all for also convincing hosting companies to sponsor nix/nixos foundation as well 
)
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Maybe an incentive would be that they get listed somewhere on the nixos.org? I guess we already do so (AWS,…) but maybe we can formalize this and invite others to do so. Just thinking out laud.
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https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_friendly_hosters
I don’t think anybody’s keeping it up to date though
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We could migrate that to nix.dev or a repo in nix-community and find a couple of people to keep an eye on it, link it nicely. Essentially anyone who runs NixOS on their VPS will be interested in having a list handy just in case.
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Please don’t delete it from the wiki! By all means link to it though.
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I am still interested in this + interested in helping keep an eye on resources/links and updating them
It may be that just iso, image, or nixos-anywhere are the best ways forward, so that support doesn’t put requirements on a hosting provider. But I also think it could be worth outreach to providers to make sure there is some onramp, and to even promote to users that the onramp exists.
I am going to reach out to 2 located near me here in Michigan in May.
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My personal approach has been to use nixos-generators and upload an image. I always feel a bit conflicted about how exactly to put NixOS on a server, but it does seem like nowadays nixos-anywhere + disko is the most versatile way to go.
Even if a provider did have a NixOS image, like there is for Amazon, I assume the first thing you’d want to do is pull in your configuration and do a nixos-rebuild (or use another deployment tool to do that for you.) It kind of seems like that’s hardly any different from using a deployment tool that can automatically run nixos-anywhere.
I guess there is still value in having the option for users to choose it. (Though, if any provider wants to attack this problem by supporting deploying a flake directly, I would be very in support of that!)
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Yes you are right about all of that. Part of the outreach effort is just a marketing exercise for nixos. Making companies aware. Also when I was mentioning images I meant more the ability to create your own image, which could be a nixos image
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