Hi everyone, A big issue for us lately has been server hosting. We have a number of network services that are very important to the existence of Wesnoth as a project. These services include,
- The main website, at http://www.wesnoth.org - Our Wiki, at http://wiki.wesnoth.org -- a Wiki running on MediaWiki - Our forum, at http://forum.wesnoth.org -- a phpbb forum - wesnothd, our multiplayer server, at server.wesnoth.org -- using wesnothd, a custom TCP network server - The Wesnoth add-on server, a custom TCP network server - http://stats.wesnoth.org, a site which collects statistics data from running Wesnoth clients. We have a project to extend the scope of this. Until recently we were hosting many of our services on Jexiste. Recently we have switched to ibiblio. However, each of these services have various limitations that makes them problematic: - Older versions of software such as Python, making it difficult to develop services as effectively as we'd like. - No support for Ruby on Rails (or Ruby at all). This limits us more than we'd like, considering developers have expressed interest in using it. - Lack of MySQL capacity. ibiblio runs just one MySQL instance, which is shared by many projects. They have warned us about us overloading MySQL with some features of phpbb. We've had to disable searching using the forums. It is unclear whether we can continue to run our forums using ibiblio indefinitely. - No support for custom network services. This means that wesnothd and the Wesnoth add-on server cannot run using these services. This means we have to scrounge around for people willing to let us run a custom network server on their box, and these boxes do not tend to be powerful enough to handle the number of multiplayer users we have been seeing lately. This may also limit the ability to run stats.wesnoth.org on the ibiblio servers. Because of this, I've had discussions with Ivanovic and Mist, and we feel that it may be time to consider trying to fund our own server. After some research, we have found that for about 90 euros/month, or $150US/month, we should be able to obtain a dedicated server with a dual core CPU, 2GB of memory, and a 100Mb connection. We feel that such a server would be sufficient to run all of the above listed services. So how to raise the money? Ideally we would pay for a year up-front, since that's likely to get us a discount. This means we will need somewhere in the region of $1700. We currently have about $200. We will get $500 for each student who participates in the Summer of Code, but that is not for some time. We could ask people to donate money to the cause. I suspect we could raise maybe $500-$700 with this approach. Finally, we could advertise, but it would likely take a while to raise money using this approach. I would be willing to initially finance at least some part of it, as long as there was some plan to repay me the money, possibly through advertising. Any thoughts? Any other ideas? Anyone who has a nice big juicy server sitting on a rack ready to go and wants to donate it to us? :-) David _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
