GRRR Squad Forum

We must look @ when our hosting unlimited 'contracted/payed' time is over.
Particularly interested in this deal for serveral reasons, but first here is the offer.


1. Server Hosting Lite
This product has been introduced by MWEB to be one of cheapest server offerings in the market, and is aimed at small businesses with a limited budget.

* No set-up fee
* Intel Xeon X3430 (8M cache, 2.40 GHz)
* 4GB 1066 DDR3 ECC RAM
* 2 x 500GB SATA hard drives; 7200rpm
* Uncapped Traffic


Cost of R683 p/m

Or (more likely) the Virtual Server option, since it's cheaper.

[TABLE="width: 500, align: left"]
[TR]
[TD]Offering
[/TD]
[TD]MWEB
[/TD]
[TD]VIRTUAL
[/TD]
[TD]HOSTING
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Virtual CPU(s)
[/TD]
[TD]1 CPU
[/TD]
[TD]1 CPU
[/TD]
[TD]2 CPUs
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]RAM
[/TD]
[TD]1 Gb
[/TD]
[TD]2 Gb
[/TD]
[TD]2 Gb
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]HDD Space
[/TD]
[TD]50Gb
[/TD]
[TD]50Gb
[/TD]
[TD]50Gb
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Setup Fee (once off)[/TD]
[TD]Free
[/TD]
[TD]Free
[/TD]
[TD]Free
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Traffic
[/TD]
[TD]Unlimited
[/TD]
[TD]Unlimited
[/TD]
[TD]Unlimited
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Retail Price (Linux)
[/TD]
[TD]R 330.00
[/TD]
[TD]R 345.00
[/TD]
[TD]R 460.00
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]















So, naturally it's a lot more expensive than our standard R90/m but we have FULL unimpeded access to our own server. That means, we could run our own Linux build, have full access to it, add VPN Software if we like, whatever we choose. Like putting Mumble Server on there or whatever else we want.

50GB isn't huge, but in Web server terms it aint small either.

Just something to think about. Naturally it ends up costing us quite a lot more per month, but with complete and full control it's quite attractive and I'd be willing to subsidize - and the physical server sits inside the ISP Interconnect room with 10Gb connections to the internet.....with no traffic limit.

Yummy.

Anyway, food for thought

Yea having access to a server, where we can run apps of our choosing would be good.

It sounds good to have access to the server but will we use it? I know you mentioned apps etc but other than mumble what are we talking?

I am a firm believer in getting the tools to fit the requirements and not getting tools and then inventing requirements so that they are used, I don't does that make sense?

If part of the Grrr vision (as Lee laid it out) means we need a server to play around with then I would be all for it, however I would not be for it if it was a case of ok we have this thing, what do we want to do with it, otherwise we could be paying for resources that we don't use.

So maybe we need clearer objectives/uses for the machine, if they are valid then we get it

I agree with Paul (*gasp*).

If we can fully utilize what is on offer...AND... we set a min sub fee for members.... then yes it would be realistic.
Otherwise, aren't we just throwing away cash that could be used for something else? I'm no IT/software guru... convince me it would be worthwhile?

Snake had an option for server sponsorship. I think we should first put a proposal to them with a full server deal. If they dont go for it, look at other options.

Just as a heads up, we renewed our rental with our current providers only a month or two back, and paid in advance for 12 months.

Seems a terrible waste to blow that money that's already been spent?

Also, at over R683 a month, that's an awful lot of money for the slush fund to cover considering the limited number of monthly contributors that we have. Adds up to R8200 a year. In perspective, that's about three quarters of the cost of our rAge accommodation this year.

I'm not averse to having better hosting, but I'd need to see a huge amount of realised potential before I'd want to increase our hosting costs by 800%.

Lee, why do you think we need this capacity? What do you want to do with it?

Dragonne wrote:I'm not averse to having better hosting, but I'd need to see a huge amount of realised potential before I'd want to increase our hosting costs by 800%.

Lee, why do you think we need this capacity? What do you want to do with it?

Yip that is what I am saying as well. Before we consider this big increase we need to be sure of what it will be used for and not get it and then try come up with ways to justify the expense

no no, R340 / m was the one to go for, but I digress - the R600/m one was for an actual server, not the virtual server.

If we've paid for the full 12 months there really is no point right now.

Something to consider however at next renewal. - Bad Service - constant "database error" messages being emailed to me (this is due to the ISP limitations of CPU/Memory in a shared customer environment) - no direct access - no explaination for outages - backhaul was hacked and they didnt know what to do about it, etc etc.

Anyway R340/m rather than R90/m for a virtual server which gives us complete control may seem like overkill to most, but there are technical reasons to justify this, I'll give you one quick one:
eg. Cannot add Forum software plugin that does awesome stuff as PHP Has not been compiled with ZENG support or PHP <-- in a shared hosting environment like we are, they will never ever recompile PHP for us. We get what we get and must live with it. But if we have full control we can go recompile as we see fit, we share with nobody.
Another example of this was that I was looking at getting a Video Transcoding (youtube like) feature added, which I could not do, I would have had to compile some things on the Linux console and then edit PHP.ini and Apache httpd.ini files in linux to get things going - not possible in shared host environment. This feature would have given us the ability to simply click add video somewhere and the upload and re-encoding to Flash video is done on the Server side - the same way it's done with YouTube, but alas - just not possible.

Also, I'm not sure how long I can hide our Mumble server on my customers network, hopefully for a long time, but nothing is guarenteed. If we had our own server, we could run mumble directly on that, no problems.

We could also then make the server a STREAMING server - * remember TwitchTV Live broadcast of a BF3 match? - well, there is Linux software that we could use as our steaming server destination, our server itself.

Lots of potential, is the bottom line I'm trying to get at.

Anyway - since we're all paid up for a year, there's no reason to go that route right now anyway.

I think it would be great to get our own server. I believe Miles found a potential server sponsor, why dont we put in a proper, well contructed proposal about what we would need from a server (hardware side), what software we would intend to run on it (games, VOIP, Website, forum, etc) and how much bandwidth we'd expect to use and see if they are willing to oblige on any fronts.

We can take it from there. As Jarrod said, no need to splurge when we have just paid up. As Lee said, current server is limited.

OK, how is this http://www.vps.co.za/local-vps-servers

R99/m for a dedicated virtual server - the specs cover all our needs and we get full (and fast) control of our own server and anything we do with it.

Seems like a great deal IMHO.