[SAC] Migration and options

[Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)]

Hi all,

Anyone else been thinking about potentially changing our web hosting?

I've had some encouraging discussion with Lance from http:// 
osuosl.org and I think we could make something really good work  
there.  We did some test on their infrastructure a couple years back,  
but at the time we were more worried about performance guarantees  
then about bandwidth, scalability and performance, etc. and not  
really too worried about costs either.  As it stands, we pay $13,200  
per year for the two boxes - at least one of which likely needs some  
upgrades.

A couple things that the OSL seems to have going for it:

* affordability, reduced costs (power + cooling costs is all that's  
need, for example)
* flexibility - could donate our own hardware to be used, instead of  
paying a premium monthly fee
* managed/unmanaged options - admins with familiarity of much of our  
toolset, and they even use IRC too :)
* online NAS backups
* access to a MySQL cluster

All this is not totally verified, but a bit more is here:
http://osuosl.org/hosting/services
http://osuosl.org/hosting

If the group is generally interested, I can continue my discussion  
with them and firm up on the costs side - or ask any particular  
questions you may have.

The solution works for many others, so perhaps it would be a fit for  
us too:
http://osuosl.org/hosting/clients

I'm in favour of looking into it more.

Tyler