[Board] Re: [SAC] Reliability of Services

[Jason Birch]

I guess I need to take some blame here, as one of the folks who was initially involved in investigating hosting solutions.  Some of the things that we were constrained by included:
 
- Managed hardware solution - we do not have the resource to provide reliable co-lo management.
- Reasonable bandwidth allowance - many hosts have incredibly stingy allowances, and huge penalties for overage
- SLA (part of due diligence for ADSK; I believe that they may have gone elsewhere for MapGuide without this)
- Full root access to the machines - many providers with SLA also have change management procedures, with costs associated - no flexibility there
 
Peer1 was the cheapest and most functional of the reliable managed hardware solutions that were reviewed at the time.  I would hate to see the current solution abandoned without proper review of the alternatives.
 
That said, I wonder if we are visible enough now that there are providers that are willing to give us some services for free; I know that pair Networks does this often.  Do we have US charity status yet?
 
Jason

________________________________

From: Frank Warmerdam
Subject: Re: [Board] Re: [SAC] Reliability of Services



jo at frot.org wrote:
>>> 4- Do we want to consider moving to another hosting platform?
>> I'm not sure what you are proposing, but I think change without
>> a clear rationale is the last thing we need.
>
> One possible reason to consider this more seriously is that PEER1
> is VERY expensive. (At 15K USD p/a, 5-10 times what it would seem
> necessary to cough up for a couple of vhosts on some anonymous rack.)

Jo,

Well, I think we need more than "a couple of vhosts".  I believe we
ended up with a relatively expensive (by my standards) solution partly
because we demanded a provider with some sort of uptime guarantee though
I'm personally not overly keen on that aspect.

If we want to reduce costs I think the most obvious step might be
to drop the second Peer1 host which we are currently using as a place
to rsync backups to, and to operate the wiki.

This would save roughly half our costs.

But all things considered $15K/yr isn't ruinous.

Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org <http://osgeo.org/> 

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