[asterisk-users] voip-info.org status update

[Gordon Henderson]

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