[CIMC-working] Server option

[Ian Bicking]

Thought I'd give a little more of a feel for going with a commercial  
server.  I contacted Tilted.com, a hosting provider in Chicago.  They  
would give us a 33% discount on a dedicated to Indymedia, so their  
basic plan would come to $100/mo.  That includes hardware, with a 20Gb  
hard drive, a decent but not great processor.  For $30/mo more we could  
get another 10Gb plus a faster processor.  Both plans come with 40Gb of  
transfers per month on a high speed connection.  There's a $200 setup  
fee as well.

So, that would be enough computer for several IMCs.

Also for your consideration, someone in Pittsburgh posted their  
bandwidth usage.  You should note that the bandwidth spikes  
considerably, so when there's something going on they get 10x the  
normal traffic or more.  I expect the same will be true for us or any  
IMC, the nature of serving news.  This is the reason we really *need*  
to be in a colocated environment, not using our own bandwidth -- when  
we're sharing a pool of bandwidth with other servers we can use more  
bandwidth as needed, but when we're on our own we either have lots of  
unused bandwidth or we're saturating the line.  That would be a problem  
with Universidad Popular as well, plus we'd potentially be slowing down  
their connection when we got a burst (though I believe we could limit  
our usage so we never used more than a certain percentage of the  
bandwidth).

http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/~toups/stats/mrtg/ 
howard.rem.cmu.edu.html