I may be able to offer another mirror site for file storage - again depends on bandwidth etc, but ive got a little free to play with. Also why bother worrying about which of the addresses to get - Personally I vote for a sam community url, but I currently have samcoupe.co.uk which I will forward onto the community site - also to save all the problems ill also purchase and forward on several other variations of the url - so if people go for a sam community (again gets my vote) ill get worldofsam.co.uk .org etc and forward web/mail to the community site.
Anyway - I think its a GREAT idea. Adrian -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Geoff Winkless Sent: 24 November 2004 10:56 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: RE: SAM Software Archive Gavin Smith wrote: > Quoting Geoff Winkless <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> What sort of bandwidth do people think it would use? I already have >> a shared (with a few old uni mates) linux host (on which I have root >> access) and would be happy to host it if we're expecting a gig or so >> downloads a month - that much we can absorb into the spare bandwidth >> we have, if it's more I'd have to discuss it with the others. > > I had a long think about hosting and our options and ways of doing it > on the cheap but in the end I thought it would be nice to spend a > fiver a month and get our own meaty bandwidth etc and not worry about > taking advantage of other people's generosity or the site suddenly > going down etc. WRT bandwidth: currently the whole machine is only using 5GB out of the monthly 30GB we've paid up-front for, however I wouldn't want to take too much of it month-on-month because that wouldn't be fair on my mates :). The point is that (barring links from geek sites like slashdot or theregister) it's not going to be a volume site, however much we'd like to think otherwise, so 5GB per month is way more than you'd need month-on-month (once you get over the initial excitement). However you always pay for more bandwidth up-front than you need because if you go over it tends to cost more - this way we share the buffer with a few other sites (we have about 10 at the moment, and they're all fairly low-volume). The other thing about the service we have is that excessive bandwidth doesn't stop the site working - I'd just have to cough up for the extra cash, and even then it's only £1 per GB. The only problem I have with services like catalyst2 (the site you mentioned) is that you don't have full control: it's a hosted service, so you have the restrictions of what you can do with it. I have full ssh root access so if (eg) you want to run some bizarre forum software you don't have to argue with a clueless support guy for an hour. Further, if one of my sites goes down I know it's either down to me to fix it, it's a hardware problem or it's the internet (and since it's in telehouse that would generally mean the whole UK web is screwed :)) You also have the advantage that the people who administer the machine have a combined unix and website admin experience of about 40 years, the other two guys are both sysadmins at university (with tens of unix servers to run) and I was admin for an ISP for a fair while. Finally the people actually doing the hosting are clueful too: check out http://www.bytemark.co.uk/hosting/virtualmachine/index.html (yes, it's a virtual machine but that's caused us 0 problems so far). If you do decide to go it alone you could do a hell of a lot worse than one of their £150/year packages (some people might remember Matthew Bloch from the days of the Acorn Arcade BBS) All this is a Good Thing when it comes to hosting software of slightly unknown legality: hosted services tend to be a bit more trigger-happy when it comes to removing sites which have potential warez. > I wouldn't think you're trying to take over, I would really hate it > if people thought of this as my pet project because I honestly think > it's 100% a sam-users thing. :) OK, then I should have written the caveat to everyone :) - my point is I don't want to be seen as imposing my thoughts on others. Anyway, the offer's there, I shan't mention it again unless asked - I have no axe to grind, it'd only mean work for me after all :) G ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________
