On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, shadowym wrote:
Hard to expect the business community to take Asterisk seriously when this sort of stuff happens IMHO.
I think you hit the nail on the head with one word: community.Asterisk is free, community supported, and the voip-info site has been provided for free - with the support of the community. The site would appear to be financially supported by a small number of quite unobtrusive google ads, and therein lies the problem...
Hosting isn't free. If you can't/won't pay for hosting, then you have to support it by advertising. I can sell you web space/servers/co-lo facilities with full disk/server/location redundancy, backups and so on, but would you be willing to pay for it? Probably not. So you takes your chances with a popular hosting company, put in a small number of google ads to pay for a basic hosting package and go with it. After-all, there are millions of websites hosted on millions of servers throughout the world - it's a highly competitive business - there are offers of hosting for £1 a month or even less, but do you think it's a sustainable model? I don't. Well, maybe it is when you have 1000s of clients with 10s of 1000s of websites (spread over 100s of servers!) but with scale comes more issues.
I can't understand how 3 of 4 hard drives could just suddenly fail simultaneously. There must be more too it. No UPS? Someone spilled their coffee into it? Something!
That does strike me as odd, but I've seen it myself with a bad batch of disks. (IBM DeathStar, Hitachi, etc.) You usually get warnings, but if you're employing monkeys & paying them peanuts, then they usually just treat them as "fire & forget" once installed in the rack and plumbed into their automated selling/billing system.
Either way, it's amateur hour!
It's the way 99% of all co-lo facilities work. Buy big, sell cheap with little or no SLA - hope that the hardware/premises/internet is reliable enough, employ monkeys, pay peanuts. If you want quality, then be prepared to pay for it, and £1 a month does not give you quality IMO, and in my experience as someone who runs a small co-lo facility, people will not pay for quality hosting. A "quality" server costs me £650, more if the client insists on a Dull. Sure, I can put together something with pair of disks for under £300, but I know (from experience!) it won't last the 4+ years I want it to last, nor deliver the preformance my clients (who are willing to pay for such a service) demand.
I'm not blaming James here because that's the way it is! I bet he's spent 100s of hours (unpaid) setting it up, running it and maintaining it, and resorted to google ads. purely to fund it. I don't envy him at all.
If I can't be confident enough in an important source of information like this then I can't be confident enough to provide an Asterisk solution to businesses. That's the way I see it. Yea, it's a wiki but it's the best source of info out there.
So how much are you willing to pay to support such a service? Gordon
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