[imported_Eru]

Wouldn't be too hard to set up a distributed method of hosting. I'm sure everyone's heard of DropBox. It basically keeps files in a folder on your HDD synced to the internet and can be synced automatically across multiple computers.

You can also share a folder so that multiple accounts have read/write access to the files in that folder. If the server files were to be kept in a shared DropBox folder, multiple available hosts could host at the same time.

What'd be next is to come up with an order of preference. The host with the best connection would be the dominant host, but if that computer stopped responding to pings, then the next computer in the hosting chain would load the server from the latest save and update the DDNS address to point to their own IP address. All this could be accomplished using DropBox and a relatively simple AutoIt script.

When the other computer came back online, it would ping the current host via the DDNS address, if it's responding to pings and it's not the machine's current IP, it could create a marker file in the dropbox that would tell the current host to do a save and shutdown and then relaunch on the main host.
(This 2nd part would be bothersome however, and probably could be skipped since it would cause the server to go down more often.)

Point being, if people wanted to host from home, it'd be quick and simple to share the hosting tasks to drastically cut downtime.

Again, I'd be happy to help with this.


====Edit====
The main problem with this is security, since multiple people will have full access to server files. I'm not sure how to get around this problem except to trust the people who are given hosting privs.