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

[Jon Pounder]

I completely agree with the cheap hosting commments - my company competes
against it all the time. Things go bad with the host in one way or another,
sites move, and the cycle repeats. Is that how someone reputable wants 
to run a
business moving their site around every couple months when things break 
? Or do
people want a company that is reliable and actually strives to deliver 
a decent
SLA ?

As for the hosting of voip-info, I don't see anything wrong with the model of
providing something useful for free but sprinkling a few ads through it 
to help
pay for the costs. Yes its annoying when something you rely on is not 
available,
but what right has anyone got to complain that is not paying to have it
available ?

Maybe a better situation would be to partner with at least one more person or
group that has hosting capacity, and split revenue in some manner to 
offset the
costs, and have it hosted at at least 2 locations to guard against 
disaster, but
with a wiki its not all that simple since its updating all the time, and
straight mirrors won't work. Something to look into, but it would take even
more volunteer hours to setup.


A service my company offers (I am not trying to plug myself, but simply 
offering
an alternative to the way it is now) is called "livebackup". Hosting is all
setup for a mirror of the complete setup which is copied over at some 
interval.
Should problems arise with the primary site that can't be fixed 
quickly, dns is
simply changed to point to the backup site and it operates as if it was the
primary. This is meant to cover these sorts of situations where a disaster is
not quickly recoverable, but running two sites in parallel has other issues
which make it too complicated for anything without a super high budget.





Quoting shadowym <shadowym at hotmail.com>:

> 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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Jon Pounder

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