[Hcoop-discuss] Help plan our next server set-up!

[ntk at hcoop.net]

> I may in the small minority here...but...given that the current expense
> for Abu is about 20%-25% of what I see as ongoing monthly fees, and that
> it amounts to around $600 a year (as I can see it), that is NOT a trivial
> amount to me...maybe per person per month, it seems to be, but when viewed
> on annual basis, it seems a decent sized amount that could go to better
> use.
> And while Adam and others may have enough to put in four digit amounts, I
> do NOT...my "income" to support my web site is fixed at $60 a year..and
> that has to cover web host + phone calls + postage + copies, etc...so my
> budget is extremely limited..that's how I ended up here to begin with...I
> was unable to find a commercial service at that time within my budget...

Like I said before, I'm committed to keeping entry-level costs at an
average of at most $5 per month even as we expand, and ideally making
entry-level membership costs constant and predictable.

It would be nice if we could offer ultra-low-cost, stripped down
feature-set to members at some point.  But realistically if we're going to
accomplish our goals of expansion I don't see how we can possibly average
less than $4 a month.  If that's a great hardship for you then you'll have
to be creative--find a way to get your site's users to chip in more or
some other source of income.

There's really not much out there in the realm of ad-free, flexible
hosting that's cheaper.  The best alternative I know of is SDF, a
nonprofit (but not member-owned or controlled) shell service.  They give
pretty much free webhosting with basic CGI, but limit you to 20M storage. 
A 1-time $36 payment will upgrade you to 100MB--but if you want to host
your own domain, that bumps you up to $12 monthly for a service that isn't
terribly fast or reliable, and a much smaller feature-set than us.

> Now paying a bit more to get data backup and such may be possible but so
> far, the only real problem I've had is no backup to provide even a "we're
> sorry but our server is down" type msg.
> I've been VERY pleased with the overall service and help I've
> gotten...given that I'm mainly a Windows user...so if that could somehow
> be addressed, then I'd be even more pleased.

Right now, if there was some disastrous outage on fyodor, we could
redirect hcoop's DNS to abu and put up a "server down" message and even
put some services on hcoop.

But with our current setup unfortunately I don't think it's possible for
Abu to automatically serve an outage message.  Normally, if fyodor is down
it's because Interserver's network is down or our server crashed/hung for
some reason and just needs to be rebooted.  In any event it should be back
up in minutes or hours at most.  Since abulafia is on a different network,
if we changed our DNS records, due to the DNS TTL it would probably take
longer for the DNS records to update than the outage would be in the first
place, and it could disrupt recovery time.

In a new setup, where we have several servers on the same rack, it would
not be impractical in the event of a relatively brief outage to reassign
IP addresses and have another server operate as a backup web server and
host as normal, or at least show such an outage message.

-ntk