Originally Posted by seksi

That's good to hear.

So, my remaining concern is that minors need a fair amount of supervision on the internet from their parents and/or legal guardians, and that they can't really enter into legal contracts like hosting agreements.

If I were inclined to show a young person how web hosting works, I would set up a real but isolated network with some old computers, install some version of linux from physical media, and set up all the infrastructure services DNS, web and e-mail servers, etc. Provided you had a modern multicore machine to offer them you can do all that on virtualization and save a lot of space, messy wires and not have to deal with crusty old machines failing all of the time. The beauty of old machines and linux is that you could teach and learn a lot of fundamental networking, programming and system administration skills without installing an X-windows system and graphical user interface that should cause parents to worry about kids viewing porn and playing violent video games, if they managed to get the educational network connected to the real internet.

Once a young person has mastered the basics of setting up servers with sshd they are going to need a lot more supervision and encouragement to develop professional ethics. You and/or their parents are going to need to audit their systems and their firewalls, you are responsible for their actions!

As far as encouraging ethics and a network that will encourage education: Maybe get them a membership to the Association for Computer Machinery, the IEEE.org or USENIX SAGE/The System Administrators' Guild?