[Finance] Re: [theforum] lists (was: We've got a serious problem here at evolt.org)

[Martin Burns]

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On 14 May 2004, at 17:25, David Kaufman wrote:

>> Assuming this is still true:
>> http://lists.evolt.org/sysadminarchive/2003-August/000765.html
>> (we should have more now, right?) then we should jfdi imo
>
> Martin, if by "we should have more" you're referring to money, then we =

> don't
> have much more, no.
>
> in the post linked above, it says we had about two thousand dollars, =

> and we
> currently have about two thousand dollars.

Actually it says:
> after doing that i realised that in the past few months we have gotten
> enough donations to put leo on it's own '$100 pr. month' box for at 
> least a
> year.

My mental arithmetic suggests something a bit over $1200. Over $2k 
represents more security than we've ever had.

> it's true this should be enough pre-pay a year of lists.evolt.org 
> hosting,

on a gold-plated server. We're currently paying $100/month (+ TX tax), 
and have a terabyte of data a month for that. Dean/John/William were 
talking about maybe a box at servermatrix. For $200/month, we'd get
https://www.servermatrix.com/solutions/sx24_server.html
whereas for $100/month, we could get 2 boxes, both with better 
performance than we have for leo at present.

The current box *performance* is OK, but being a Cobalt Raq, it's a 
PITA to manage doing what we need it to. Dean brought up the "Admin" 
list thing. We completely broke the Cobalt interface (which was OK for 
adding single sites with standard HTTP/PHP/ASP/Perl/SSH/FTP/mail/simple 
lists) when we put mailman in. Zope won't run forever because of 
stooopid user quota issues.

> but i'd like to answer the questions, first:
>
> how long did it take to raise $2K

Not that long iirc - with a decent push, maybe 6 months. Push will 
include:
1) Tshirts - it's the summer, let's push it!
2) Actually talking about donations on the public lists 
(thelist/thechat)
3) No doubt putting hands in our own pockets.

> and at what rate can we hope to raise
> money going forward, including revenue from donations, affiliation 
> programs,
> and now advertising?  i'm going to need a bit of time to do these 
> kinds of
> revenue projections.

John did a back of fag packet calculation, and reckoned we had enough 
pledges of regular donations to completely fund a box.

> how much bandwidth do we use on l.e.o, can we predict the exact =
monthly
> expense? apparently these estimates have been done, but i dont know 
> what
> they are.

Last month, we did 45Gig. Or under 5% of allocation.

> what is the contingency plan if, a year later, we can't afford to 
> continue
> to pay our way?

Back to where we are now. But a year's security is better than we've 
had before. Right now, William, GC, John and I can just say "screw you 
guys" and turn it off tomorrow if we were so minded. Same with Jeff. 
Because evolt.org isn't a paying customer, we have no SLAs and are 
always at the risk of "We need to do this and sorry, but you are at the 
bottom of the priority list and have no comeback" which is how we left 
CSI.

> how do the rest of evolt's servers affect the plan.

The Other One, you mean.

> that said, i think it would be *great* to get even just one box moved =

> to
> evolt owned and operated service, especially if the sysadmins concur =

> that
> moving l.e.o. would be a welcome opportunity to redo it's 
> configuration from
> scratch, and make list consolidation go more smoothly.  i just want to =

> do it
> as part of a plan, with an eye to moving *everything* sooner rather 
> than
> later, if thats at all feasible.

Plan is good. But to move the other one, we need to do one of two 
things:
1) Take on support for a Windows/SQLServer/CF box (and note, pay 
licensing costs)
2) Move weo off the current platform to something free - likely Linux + 
Apache + OSS CMS (Drupal, Plone or similar)

In either case, it will take a large amount of discussion to make the 
decision - either way, we're going to piss people off who have given a 
lot of time and effort to evolt, and don't deserve to be pissed off. 
This is part of why the discussion hasn't happened yet.

Cheers
Martin
- --
Now playing on iTunes: "Me Diras Que Sabroso" by Compay Segundo from 
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