--On June 6, 2008 11:53:49 AM +0200 Manfred Usselmann
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
What you are saying sounds like a contradiction to me. On one side it
is just a hobby site and generates no income and on the other hand it
is a critical server with millions of hits and the box can't even go
down for a short time.
What happens in case lets say your harddisk crashes? Something which is
not an exactly rare case...
Actually, that happened to us a couple of years ago, on the old server
while it still the only server, and I was on vacation 1600 miles away. We
ended up having to pay the hosting company to fix the hardware problem and
reinstall FreeBSD (which they unfortunately did a lousy job of), and then
I rebuilt the server and restored it to service over a dialup account
while on vacation.
Many of our users are retired old guys who can barely figure out how to
use a computer. When the site goes down, some of them claim to go into
withdrawal. The total downtime for that incident was about two days, and
they "suffered" greatly.
If the users are not paying for the service they should be able to
accept a downtime, may it be scheduled or even completely unexpected.
Or pay / donate for a more reliable service (Redundant server as hot
standby / testbed etc.).
Actually, it was the owners who had to be convinced to accept donations
from the users, who were all too willing to help. The new server was
purchased with those donations. Maybe some day we *will* be able to
afford redundancy.
Paul Schmehl
If it isn't already obvious,
my opinions are my own and not
those of my employer.
