Was thinking of suggesting something like this, though I'm obviously incredibly slow since this thread is three pages deep already :/
A couple of things...is it worth waiting until the meet (if we're going to have enough comps there) to see if interest doesn't die down, and how good it is without lag with a fair few players in?
Another thing is that I'm going back up to Durham in October...now, the situation I'm in is I've got a P3 500, 512 ram down here, and a spare ADSL line, so I can tell it to host dedicated with all bandwidth, rather than me using the line too. (That's assuming that I understood Roch was running dedicated and playing on the same line). The only problem is that I'm behind a NAT, and unless it's very easy to open up the port for the dedicated server, and it doesn't compromise security, I'm not going to be able to run it, because it's my Mum's nat and connection for her business, and she runs it with a couple of partners.
Is there any deal where we can do a trial week/month on a dedicated server and see how good the con is, and how many people it can support without lag. I'm happy to contribute atm, but when I move up north I'll be sharing one 512 con with 4 other peeps that might want to do bandwidth hungry things, so I'm not sure if I could carry on putting cash in.