[Finance] Future Hosting finance position

[David Kaufman]

"Martin Burns" <martin at easyweb.co.ukrote:
> While I think that it's been absolutely excellent that we've relied
> (and at the moment continue to rely) on hosting donated by
individuals,
> ...I think it's non-ideal to rely on personally-provided [hosting
service]
>
> a) it depends on the ability and desire of a small number of people.
> One or two people no longer being able and/or willing provide hosting
> could kill the org at short notice and that is not an appropriate risk
> for us to take. When Dan gave up hosting *eo, he gave us very, very
> fair notice. When Ron gave up hosting *eo, he gave us short, but just
> about manageable notice. There is no guarantee that that would happen
> in future. Not having off-site backups for either leo or weo at
present
> makes me even more concerned about this.

i agree completely with this.  backups are essential, some failover plan
would be expected, and ... errgh -- donated hosting is like living with
your parents.  while kind, very cost effective, and "friendly", it comes
with it's own sets of problems.  if we *can* sustain our own hosting, we
should, if only to not burden the generosity of our members, but also so
that we can know exactly if, when and why our situation may be becoming
precarious.

> c) we can afford not to. As I understand it (Dave/Elfur, correct me if
> I'm wrong), we have enough cash in the bank to guarantee sensible
> commercial hosting for a good leo/deo/beo box for a *year*.

i can't correct you because i don't know the whole story but... what
would it cost?  to clarify (what i know so far of) our finanical
situation, there is less than $300 in the bank account, at the moment
(the initial deposit was just under $600, but at least one of the old
checks in this deposit were returned unpaid, and i'm still waiting for
the bank to respond back with copies of the bounced items).  Marlene
mentioned recently that she's received another check from Amazon (but
didn't mention the amount) and i don't have access to the current Paypal
balance, but presume it is substancial.

the more interesting questions to me are: 1) do we know what it *costs*
to host ourselves for a year?  2) how many boxes would we need?  3) how
much bandwidth are we consuming monthly?  4) are all, some, one, or none
of the systems currently Cold Fusion on Windows?  can these services be
migrated to open source platforms on commodity hardware in a competively
priced 1U of rack-estate somewhere?

> ... In this area, [a year is] as close to 'forever' as we need to
worry
> about, and it's far longer than the current state of no guarantee
> whatsoever. Of course, if we run out of money, then 'mates' hosting
may
> be all we can afford, at which point we cut our cloth accordingly.

um, pardom my ignorance, but whose generosity are we currently enjoying,
and where?  are we (at least) in a commercial facility, or is
weo/leo/beo running on a commodore 64 in someone's spare bathroom? ;-)

> Therefore, I think we should talk about a policy for any new
commercial
> hosting that requires a cost/benefit case from desdev and/or sysadmin
> for using any non-free software before any funds are released to pay
> for hosting or direct licenses.

agreed.  assuming current market rates for one colocated *nix box (and
quite nice competitive rates they are lately!) and 30-60 GB of traffic
monthly, we're talking under $100 / month for the commodity packaged
service.  that's $1200 USD / year, available from multiple providers
(Valueweb / Server Beach / RackShack) but i'm guessing we'd need way
more than the standard traffic allowance these types of hosting
providers offer (ServerBeach even goes so far as to advertise "deterrant
pricing" for bandwidth overuse:
http://www.serverbeach.com/catalog/faq.php#5-65).

so we need first to inventory and itemize our current hardware,
software, bandwidth and storage usage so we can estimate our annual
needs in detail, but i think finding a commercial host, and being able
to fund a year of self-sustained hosting would be quite a worthy
achievment to strive for, as would be reducing or removing our
dependence on whatever proprietarily licensed software we're currently
using.

i'd be more than willing and able to research providers and shop for
reliable, affordable hosting once i have a handle or exactly what we
need.

-dave