[cumbria_lug] UserGroup...

[Russ Phillips]

trevor at haven.demon.co.uk wrote:
> The cheapest Hosting is managed but
> http://www.diyhost.co.uk/hosting.htm
> £50 for twelve months and everything I think we would need.
> I suspect that these are virtual servers using VMWare. 
> 
> All others are asking from £99 to £129 per month mark
> for a server. Circa £1550 per year, which is a lot, even 

1&1 do a root server for £29 per month (http://tinyurl.com/2djsr). It 
includes 10GB/month of bandwidth. DIY host gives you 'unlimited' 
traffic, but the Fair Usage Policy states:

<quote>
Accounts specifying "unlimited data transfer" allow you to transfer an 
unlimited amount of data to and from your website as long as this does 
not impact server or network resources: unless you are transferring over 
350Mb of data per day (an average of over 10Gb per month), this is 
unlikely to happen - but this "maximum recommendation" may vary 
depending on network and server conditions and at Easy Internet 
Solutions Ltd discretion.
</quote>

which looks like you effectively get 10GB/month of bandwidth, same as 
1&1. DIY Host are still cheaper, but you don't get your own server. I've 
fantasised about having my own server for some time, but to be honest, I 
can cope with a mixture of SourceForge.net (to host www.ooomacros.org), 
my ISP (PlusNet - hosting my other web sites) and a 486 hooked up to 
ADSL, which gets used as an IRC server for a bunch of friends every Monday.

> If we offer hosting to others then we would be better of having
> a more formal structure than currently exists if for no other
> reasons than to reassure people that we are not going to disappear
> after three months and so we can have a single account from which
> we can pay for a server.  

That is a good point.

> Who gets to be root ?
> 
> Do we divi up disk space / bandwidth based on fiscal contribution?

Those are very good questions, and I don't know the answers.

Russ