This blog entry is plainly advertising for a little French nonprofit forge, TuxFamily. Well I hope it's OK to advertise them since they're working in their freetime and offer their services without charge. They do not even use ads to make money.

If you've been looking for hosting for your Free Software project, look no further, for this is the best forge that I know:

• It itself is entirely Free Software


• The server is damn fast. Check how Eigen's website loads fast.


• It runs PHP4 and PHP5 so you can easily put a wiki online. They even have a tutorial (French wiki; apparently it's not yet translated). They also have other features like SQL server, download area for large files (up to a gigabyte or more)...


• Not only the web server is fast, but SVN is also the fastest I've seen: "svn up" and "svn ci" take only a fraction of a second. They also support CVS... and Git !


• Likewise, the mailing lists are the fastest and most reliable I've seen. I rely on tuxfamily for Eigen's mailing lists, and the mail is consistently delivered within a few seconds.


• It does not use any ads. No ads on your project website, no ads on their website, no ads in the mailing lists...


• The crew is awesome and very low-latency... all my requests have been handled within hours at most, and often within minutes.

That's what I've known for a long time and made me think of Tuxfamily as 'great'. But recently something made it move to my 'awesome' category. I'm a mathematician and my work consists partly in editing LaTeX files with colleagues. I've been looking for a forge to host collaborative math projects, i.e. doing math research in the same way as Free Software is done, just replacing C++ by LaTeX. SourceForge refused, but Tuxfamily accepted.

Lastly, Tuxfamily is running a donation campaign. It's their first one in 5 years of existence, and all the more justified since they don't use ads.