A percentage of all my profits go back to the community. What about you?
-----Original Message----- From: Gordon Henderson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 1:42 AM To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion Subject: RE: [asterisk-users] voip-info.org status update 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 _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users