About Bur.st Networking

The Association

About Bur.st Networking Inc.

Bur.st was originally founded in August 1998. It was finally incorporated as a not-for-profit community association in October 2003 and given all ownership of Bur.st, its trademarks and its operations.
Bur.st's certificate of Incorporation

Committe

Bur.st's current (2006-2007) committee consists of:

Terms on Bur.st's committee are for a period of two years, with 3 members retiring at each year's AGM.

If you are interested in standing for a position on the committee, you must be a paid voting member. A call for nominations goes out to all Bur.st users and members before the AGM, which is held within four months of the end of the financial year.

Constitution

Bur.st's current constitution/rules of association can be found here in PDF format. Any changes made to these rules are voted in by Bur.st's voting members at a SGM or AGM.

Membership of the association

There are two classes of membership of Bur.st. By making a donation to Bur.st to help pay the bills, you automatically become a non-voting member, with a $0 annual renewal fee.

If you're interested in Bur.st beyond just being a user, voting membership is for you. Voting membership costs $15 a year and falls due on your anniversary. It gives you the ability to vote on any issues that come up and allows you to stand for election onto the committee, who do the general day-to-day running of Bur.st.

To become a Voting member of Bur.st, please make a payment and use the Membership form to inform us of your payment.

You can EFT your membership payment through to our bank account.

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The ISP

What is Bur.st?

Bur.st is one of Australia's few non-profit ISP's and provides assorted Internet services to Australian individuals and other non-profit organizations (clubs, associations etc).

Today Bur.st has over 2000 users and does hosting for over 4000 domains, enabling non-profit organisations, individuals and communities, access to essential internet services that are often too expensive if serviced by regular ISPs who are primarily focused on end user internet connectivity.

Who runs Bur.st?

The day-to-day technical operations are run by the following volunteers:

  • Simon Chalmers (Technical Manager)
  • Trent Lloyd (Senior Systems Administrator)
  • Ben Brooks (Programmer)
  • Robert Vangel (Systems Administrator)
  • Chris McNeil (Systems Administrator)
  • Joshua Stewart (Webmaster)

Bur.st's staff volunteer their time and do not get paid (or often thanked!)

I want to sign up as a user!

See the sign-up page.

Who owns Bur.st?

Bur.st Networking Inc. is an independent incorporated association. It owns itself. Bur.st was originally founded by Paul Day in August 1998 and ownership of all operations/trademarks were transferred to the new incorporated association in Oct 2003.

Why do you give things away for free?

Bur.st isn't quite free.

If you're using a service provided by Bur.st, please consider making a donation to help pay the (considerable) bills. For details on how to donate and a list of advantages that come from donating, please see the Donations page.

Why don't you do dial-up/ADSL?

Providing dial-up/ADSL Internet access is a saturated market. It is also an equipment (and hence cost) heavy service to provide. Commercial ISP's barely cover their costs so Bur.st has no chance of breaking even.

Bur.st prefers to concentrate on niche services such as web-hosting / domain services for non-profits and individuals and Unix shell access.

Service guarantees

Like the majority of end-user ISPs, Bur.st offers absolutely no service guarantees. This is because:

  • Many issues that could result in an outage are outside of Bur.st's controls.
  • Bur.st is not a commercial service.
  • Bur.st's staff are unpaid volunteers.

That said, Bur.st's availability is very high and is comparable to commercial ISPs.

Privacy statement

Bur.st treats all information with the strictest of confidence. See Bur.st's Privacy Policy for more information.

Acceptable Use Policy

Just as Bur.st respects its users' privacy, you are expected to respect the access given to you. See Bur.st's Acceptable Use Policy for more information.

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Member Pages

A listing of some of our members pages can be accessed here: http://support.bur.st/members.php

If you would like to add your Bur.st site to the members list then there is a form available on the same page.

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