[clue-admin] Future Hosting Plans

[Jed S. Baer]

Hi Folks.

Time is running shorter. The old thread on this is:

http://cluedenver.org/pipermail/clue-admin/2009-June/003490.html

A few points to consider:

1) VPS has been very stable. It's also the most we've ever spent on
hosting. And we're out of money.

2) Our co-located hosting had times of stability, but we were
plagued with hardware and other issues.

3) Having our own server, virtual or otherwise, requires having a real
sysadmin. I believe Crawford is willing to continue doing that job, but I
wonder whether our needs rise to that level any more.

4) When we went to the VPS, the only real argument for continuing to have
our own server was the need to service the commitments we had made for
the membership program. Since that is de-facto dead, we should examine
what our needs really are.

5) VPS or shared hosting frees us from having to worry about hardware.
This is a very good thing, IMHO. It also gets redundant network
connections and UPS power. Not that we have 24/7 requirement, but in the
past, when we've had outages, recovery timeframe was measured in days
required to find hardware, redo the OS install and relocate the box.
Restoring the website wasn't ever a big deal. Don't know about Mailman.

6) Shared hosting plans are available that provide Mailman and shell
access. I haven't ever seen CVS available, but then I never looked for it
either. Whether we even need shell access is debatable, but that depends
on other factors.

7) If we were to go with a typical shared hosting plan, we'd probably
need to rethink how we update the website. I've seen shared hosting plans
that offer WebDAV. Other possibilities come to mind, some of them a bit
goofy, but do-able. Probably not worth thinking about in detail at this
point, but something to keep in mind if a plan to use shared hosting
looks likely.

8) A shared hosting plan without shell access would mean coming up with a
new way to do offsite backups.

9) Is it a good time to really re-think what we need? Waaaaay back, we
had an offer from, IIRC, someone at Tummy.com to host the mailing lists.
If I'm reading the webalizer reports correctly, more than half of our site
traffic is web spiders. I don't know how much more than 50% is spiders,
bots, whatever, but 92% of HTTP requests in November (so far) are direct
requests, i.e. no referrer -- the vast majority of traffic we serve does
not come from people finding the site via a search engine, or a link from
someplace else. It's pretty hard to gauge the effectiveness / usefulness
of the website based on just webalizer reports, but sometimes I wonder
about it.

Well, that ought to get the ball rolling.

-- 
Ok, so we should be thinking of a lovable, cuddly, stuffed penguin
sitting down after having gorged itself on herring. Still with me? 
 -- Linus Torvalds