[Imc-aotearoa-tech] hosting

[Andrew McNaughton]

On Fri, 19 Mar 2004, finn c. wrote:

> I have to say I'm a bit sceptical about going with a commercial host,
> purely because I'm concerned they would pull our site with a small legal
> push. I had a look over their ToS and we are already violating them on
> several points.
>
> Most IMC server's are collocated with commercial ISP's, and a
> relationship is built up with the company beforehand [some even donate
> the bandwidth]. Although in saying that, Cat is running Sydney IMC off a
> similar setup to yours [although they are leasing a collocated server,
> so they have total control over it].

Cat's server (colourful.cat.org.au) is not a full colocated server, but
rather a VDS server - basically a virtual machine with an independent
operating system and IP, but still sharing hardware with a number of other
servers.

There's a lot to be said for this sort of system.  Apart from the
combination of flexibility and affordability, the entire file system can
be moved to a different VDS server, and run without change.  Shifting to a
different ISP is still going to involve chaning IP, but that's about it.
So in that sense the consequences of an ISP pulling out are less than they
might be otherwise.

Sonia at Cat was pointing out the deals available at jvds.com recently.  I
don't know how solid they are under pressure, but the prices certainly
look good.

I haven't found any VDS server deals outside of the US which look
particularly affordable.  There's a few around starting at $100/month, but
that includes a lot less bandwidth than the US deals, where bandwidth is
essentially not a big issue in terms of cost.

Andrew


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Andrew McNaughton           Currently in Boomer Bay, Tasmania
andrew at scoop.co.nz
Mobile: +61 422 753 792     http://staff.scoop.co.nz/andrew/cv.doc