We are the old school internet. We are open-source aficionados and DIY
geeks who build and host things on the Internet. We are firm believers
that anyone can use the Internet and we want to retain the charm and
quirkiness of the original Internet that wasn't owned by giant
corporations. We're just a bunch of private citizens who do a bunch of
colocated hosting for whatever projects we're working on.
- People-focused. We help people do things with the Internet: host
personal blogs, personal email domains, web sites, etc. We're not
really here to help companies make money on the Internet, but if our
members want to host a commercial site here (like an online store)
that's totally fine.
- No AI. We are not offering any artificial intelligence services
and we're not feeding any of our data to any predictive AI or
generative AI models. If someone wants to do that, they can do that
elsewhere, not here.
- No Advertisements. Nothing here is funded by web advertisements.
We don't use analytics, trackers, or ads on any nova.org pages.
Again, if a member wants to use these technologies on their own
site, they can.
- Good enough. Our services are reliable enough. They work well
enough. We are not going to win awards for reliability, durability,
scalability or many other -ilities. But you can count on us. Most of
our members use these services as their primary email, web site,
domain, etc.
The Northern Virginia Internet Access Cooperative (NVIAC) was originally
founded in 1995 as part of Fairfax Public Access television. The mission
at that time was to provide affordable Internet connectivity to
organizations and individuals, through a cooperative model. In the same
way that public-access TV and radio were made, NVIAC was made to provide
public access to the Internet. Over the years we provided dial-up
internet through a modem bank, then email, shell, FTP, and web services.
A lot has changed in that time.