Mirror fontz.ch!

If you like our site and have the appropiate technical infrastructure, you could help us out by providing a fontz.ch mirror in your country. This site provides all the information you need if you're interested.

Why?

The idea of a mirrored font site may be a bit unconventional. But fonts are important ressources and it's good to have a real reliable font site that is always there for you. It's quite common within the open source community to mirror files - so why not font files? ;-)

Interested?

Basic requirements

• A Linux-flavour webserver with static IP
• A decent internet connection
• About 500 MB spare diskspace with room to grow

System requirements

• Installed 'less' and 'grep' (should be installed by default)
• A working rsync client
• A working cron daemon
• A virtual host based webserver (Apache prefered)
• A recent PHP version installed
• Optional: NTP sync cron, to avoid timing problems ;-)

Apache requirements

• Once again, mod_php ;-)
• Really important is mod_rewrite

PHP requirements

• A recent PHP release
• allow_url_fopen must be true for the vhost
• Full linking with GD library, including Freetype and PNG support

That's it! ;-)

Pretty simple requirements, are they?! ;-) A database like MySQL is not needed. This fact has the upside that your mirror will cause a very low CPU usage even with a lot hits. fontz.ch has a special way to display all the information on the site, all necessary data is included within the rsync transfer.

What will you get?

I'm honest with you: no one will get rich with fontz.ch. This site has been a non-profit thing since the beginning and this won't change until I can't afford it to do so. So in first place you'll get honor ;-)

More seriously. As you see on the right, every mirror donator gets a link on every single page of his fontz.ch mirror. This leads to a big Google ranking increase (in most cases), as Google treats every mirror as own site (I guess). Every fontz.ch mirror serves some thousands different pages, so you get a lot of links to your site. Anyway, this should not be the only reason for you.

Another key point is that providing a mirror doesn't cost a lot of time. In fact you make three directories, enter two new Cronjobs and that's it! Setting up a mirror is a work of five minutes for a geeky system administrator.

Your virtual host will get a hostname like yourcountrycode.fontz.ch, i.e. us.fontz.ch, de.fontz.ch and so on.. we could also deal to incorporate your company name into the hostname, no problem..

Contact us

If you're interested and fulfill the requirements, don't hesitate to contact us through the online form. Just write a few lines about your server and provide a reply address, we'll write you back then. Thanks!