Theocacao: The Hosting Solution Continued

The Hosting Solution Continued

Following up to the previous entry, We've decided to upgrade to a full rack to get the Xserve solution going. I wanted to share a few details because many of you donate to (and use) the sites that all of this is intended for.

The plan, in short, is to share hardware, bandwidth and cabinet space with a friend who runs an unrelated set of services. The entity that is very loosely defined as Tree House Ideas — effectively, the combination of Theocacao, Cocoa Dev Central and Cocoa Blogs — will pay half of the $600/per month hosting fee.

This is not cheap, but we've tried number of different options before, and I feel very strongly that the Xserve + Hurricane Electric combination is the best overall fit. The total per-year cost for service will be around $3,600. I'm using the donations to help cover this. In other words, any funds contributed go directly into operational costs.

That, of course, doesn't include hardware, my time, and so on. But I think it helps to give a clearer picture of what things cost. Your tax dollars at work, and so forth. As I said before, no small amount of time goes into this, so updates have been light on the sites during the transition. Thanks for your patience.

The Hosting Solution Continued
Posted May 15, 2007 — 11 comments below

Alex Gordon — May 15, 07 4117

Wow, well this is the kind of thing I can donate to, but there are no obvious donation links on any of your sites' homepages.

Scott Stevenson — May 15, 07 4118

but there are no obvious donation links

True. One of the things I'd be busy addressing if I wasn't working on the server stuff. :) Any of the recent Cocoa Dev Central article pages have donation buttons, such as Intro to Quartz II. Thanks!

Marco Masser — May 15, 07 4120

Seems as if now is finally the right time to make a donation. Thanks for all the extra work you put into your sites, I really enjoy reading Theocacao as much as I enjoy learning from Cocoa Dev Central and all it's links. Keep up the good work!

I hope you like some €s too :)

Mal — May 15, 07 4121

Taking a full rack is an awfully high premium just to stay with Hurricane, you would need another 6 servers in there to get back to 1u pricing, which is 12 "users" in this case.

We do appreciate all you give to the community, and I know that the incoming tax dollars have been pretty scarce, but these tax dollars would have to work pretty hard just to cover this premium.

Chris Ryland — May 15, 07 4122

Scott, that is a fairly high premium just to get a box to hold your Xserve.

With iServeTech.com, a Pittsburgh co-lo ISP, I'm only paying $80/month for a 1U Xserve G5, with 200Mb/s burstable to the net, 1Mb/s averaged over the month. But I suppose you've gotta find something local.

Joshua Pennington — May 15, 07 4123

I'd be interested in Theocacao (and Cocoa Dev Central) t-shirts - that would be a fun way to support the blog.

Scott Stevenson — May 15, 07 4124

I would love to find something cheaper, but discounts don't mean anything if the reliability isn't there. HE has been very reliable, and their customer service is always accessible. I do need physical access, so something out of state is not an option. Considering all of the bandwidth the three sites eat up, $300/mo actually isn't that bad.

That said, if somebody knows of another facility in the south bay, I'm more willing to look into it. I've done a ton of research, though, and this seems like the best of the available options.

Jose R. Vazquez — May 15, 07 4126

I second Joshua's idea of T-shirts. I'd be up for that. It's probably too late now, but I would even wear one to WWDC. Hmm, let's see... five days, Big Nerd Ranch, ADC, Daring Fireball... yep! I still have two days left! I vote you go for TheoCacao first... this one is the coolest IMHO

John Pannell — May 15, 07 4127

Perhaps you'd be interested in offering shared hosting on your Xserve to offset the costs, maybe to some other devs? I'd be interested in moving over to something where I knew I was getting great reliability and the warm fuzzy factor...

Scott Stevenson — May 15, 07 4128

@John Pannell: Perhaps you'd be interested in offering shared hosting on your Xserve to offset the costs, maybe to some other devs
I'm thinking about it. I don't know if we have the resources to do this on a widespread basis, but we could in a few select cases.

Zsolt — May 16, 07 4130

Scott, you make a good point of not having the resources to be a hosting provider on your Xserver at HE. Perhaps if there was a pre-packaged hosting tool for OS X Server that required minimal administration, you could do it, and offset you own hosting costs.

But there is no pre-packaged hosting tool yet. Can we form an open source project to make one ? Of course, the tool would have to be an embodiment of the 'Mac way.'

Although I have very little extra time, and I am a novice at Cocoa, I am willing to take part if there is interest. I know I will learn a lot doing this.

Take care,
Zsolt

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