Nova.Org's Mission

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.

Tenets

• 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.

Our History

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.