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

[Davis Sylvester III]

shadowym wrote:
> A percentage of all my profits go back to the community.
>
> What about you? 
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gordon Henderson [mailto:gordon+asterisk at drogon.net] 
> Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 1:42 AM
> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
> Subject: RE: [asterisk-users] voip-info.org status update
>
> 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
>
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>   

Guys don't you think this thread has gone on long enough.  We all 
support this community!!!  My suggestion would be the same as many 
others have stated, another place for additional information is great.  
I would not want to totally write off the guys at voip-info.

I would suggest that we create a new wiki, make it solely for Asterisk 
topics, as not to offend or replace voip-info.  Build mirrors to 
multiple sites and multiple domain names.  This would give this 
community a second resource with redundancy which is what I think ALL of 
us are looking for.  I have taken the pleasure, of registering the 
domain name ASTERISKONLINE.ORG.  

I will donate a dedicated server with bandwidth to the cause.  I am 
looking for additional people to help populate the wiki with useful 
information and to help maintain the site.  I would suggest that ee have 
maybe 4 or 5 mirrors to start off and a core group of admins to help 
maintain the site.

I am willing to work with anyone else that is about providing a solution 
to our current issue.  If you guys want to REALLY work toward a 
solution, here's the chance.  For the individuals that are interested in 
helping e-mail me.