On Jan 9, 2008, at 12:15 AM, James Newton wrote: > I would love to move to a hosting service. Here are the points that > I have > to get past (and which none of the hosts I have checked on allow or > will > answer questions about) > > 1. Custom 404 ASP script. All the pages are "processed" before being > displayed to the requesting browser. Email address obfuscation is > only one > of the many reasons for that. I would assume that a good Windows-based virtual hosted system could handle this, it's just your own copy of Windows running on a virtualized box, if it's done right. You log in and do what you want. (Think VMWare or similar run by the hosting company, not a cheap webserver-only virtualization that mucks with the http server to make it handle multiple domains... anyone can do that.) > 2. Email to archive gateway. The existing mail server has an option > to call > a program when email arrives and that is how it gets put into the > archive. > How do I do that on a virtual server? I would assume that however you do it on the current server could be setup to do the same thing. I don't know your setup, but the list server somehow talks to your web server, that communication and software wouldn't change. ??? > 3. Move and search 2 GB of archived posts. No, google will NOT do > it. They > ONLY index what THEY want to index. I've been trying to get them to > index > the PICList archives for years. The search engine on the current > server may > be a tad slow, but it is searching ALL 2 GB of emails. Not to > mention what a > pain it will be to actually move all that to the remote server. Again same thing, just move it to the virtual server. I would assume a good hosting company would allow you to pay them some (minimal) amount to have a live tech plug in a USB drive or something you'd ship them if the bandwidth and time isn't there to do a multi-hour (slow) transfer of gigabytes of data. Send 'em a DVD and tell 'em to put it in the drive for you, etc. I understand your concerns, but I think if you stick with professional hosting companies and talk to them, there's cost and infrastructure benefits to not hosting servers in small environments anymore. Where the price breakpoint is, I'm not sure -- but many large organizations (Expedia comes to mind, and they're an "all Windows" shop) build their own servers but don't host/house them in-house -- they leave the multi- homed multiple-backbone routing to someone else, the air conditioning, the power backup, the hands-on (if they need a live technician), the firewalls... lots of the administrivia (that's the word I like to call it) to another organization and focus on their core business. If it were truly cheaper to host stuff internally long-term, the data center market wouldn't exist. One story from a friend in the medium-sized data center hosting biz is that their company has a large customer (a name on the Net that most people would recognize) that has two rows of 7' rack cabinets filled with 1RU Windows machines. They literally let them die out of the cluster as they have problems, or shut them down, and when they drop to 2/3 of their full server capacity, they schedule flights for a team of admins to come in, upgrade whole racks at a time, repair or replace the failed hardware or reload the software from bare-metal, and when they leave, the site is back at 100% server farm capacity, with no down-time. (Actually my friend uses it as a story of how NOT to do things, he says the vast majority of the problems encountered that cause server shutdowns are due to Windows/IIS, and he has similar sized Linux/Unix customers who maybe have 5% of their server cluster farms down, but he agrees that either way is a valid server farm management technique -- do whatever you're used to, he says.) But there's definitely going to be a size and services breakpoint where it becomes cost-effective to host something "outside". I can't do that math for anyone, since I haven't priced data center or co- location facilities in a while, but when I worked in that biz, there was a LOT of competition. Rackspace, Server Beach, etc... not mom and pop shops, UNLESS (like with many products) you can find a local place that has EXCELLENT (read: smart) staff and charges less. Those deals are out there... but like any good deal, if you don't almost stumble upon them, finding them often takes more time/effort (lost opportunity costs) than is reasonable. I have a friend who runs a small hosting/co-location environment in a former C-Band TV uplink facility that was abandoned that he bought for a reasonable price. He and a few others put sweat equity into cleaning it up, adding generators, adding multiple fiber routes to it (the expensive part), etc... and yes -- it has some bandwidth and redundancy limitations over "the big boys" like Savvis (purchasers of Exodus) and SunGard (purchasers of a lot of mid-sized data centers as well as a complete server farm management company to start with), but I understand them and still host a box there. No matter how I slice it, their backbone connectivity and latency numbers beat anything I could ever have installed at a residential or most small business locations. I believe you're in California, right? The co-location biz out there was way over-built for a long time, and lots of mergers happened, etc. There should be some really good prices out there. Not to mention it meets one of my other personal rules... unless I'm going for geographic diversity (to avoid things like large-scale natural disasters, which I've had nothing big or interesting enough to do that with yet), the data center must be within reasonable driving distance of my home... sometimes you just have to get to the box... in my case, the boxes are traditionally "co-located" and aren't virtuals, but I've helped folks with virtuals before, and from our viewpoint, you have no idea they're even on a shared hardware platform with others... you just log into them and do whatever... the only time the hosting folks get involved is in mounting physical media for loading things, or in reconfiguration of the virtual to allow more bandwidth, CPU, RAM, etc... at a price. Rent-a-server, is what I'd call it. The standard fiscal metrics apply, just like the rent-vs-buy decisions we all make on various products... There are other options -- like many cities having fiber all over the place and a telco-operated MPLS network, but that's usually far more useful to connect sites within the city than cost-effective in providing bandwidth back-haul to a back-bone (or three). In that case, it'd be a "I need high bandwidth and I can get it so cheaply here at this location because we're on the fiber ring that I don't mind building, hosting and maintaining the server hardware myself). -- Nate Duehr nate@natetech.com -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist