I completely agree with the cheap hosting commments - my company competes
against it all the time. Things go bad with the host in one way or another,
sites move, and the cycle repeats. Is that how someone reputable wants
to run a
business moving their site around every couple months when things break
? Or do
people want a company that is reliable and actually strives to deliver
a decent
SLA ?
As for the hosting of voip-info, I don't see anything wrong with the model of
providing something useful for free but sprinkling a few ads through it
to help
pay for the costs. Yes its annoying when something you rely on is not
available,
but what right has anyone got to complain that is not paying to have it
available ?
Maybe a better situation would be to partner with at least one more person or
group that has hosting capacity, and split revenue in some manner to
offset the
costs, and have it hosted at at least 2 locations to guard against
disaster, but
with a wiki its not all that simple since its updating all the time, and
straight mirrors won't work. Something to look into, but it would take even
more volunteer hours to setup.
A service my company offers (I am not trying to plug myself, but simply
offering
an alternative to the way it is now) is called "livebackup". Hosting is all
setup for a mirror of the complete setup which is copied over at some
interval.
Should problems arise with the primary site that can't be fixed
quickly, dns is
simply changed to point to the backup site and it operates as if it was the
primary. This is meant to cover these sorts of situations where a disaster is
not quickly recoverable, but running two sites in parallel has other issues
which make it too complicated for anything without a super high budget.
Quoting shadowym <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
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
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