I've worked out a provisional hardware budget for Q3 2004 based on our past spending patterns.

We may need to spend $11000 (assuming we follow last quarter's growth rate) to $73000 (assuming a repeat of the absurd growth rate a quarter before that - probably caused by the installation of the new server farm) on servers by the end of third quarter (which started 1 July). Both of those figures, however, are probably outliers and thus do not represent a trend.

1) Averaging all growth rates since Q3 2002 gives an increase in traffic (hits) per quarter of 90.98%, meaning a Q3 2004 budget of between $26000 to $32000.

2) Removing the last two quarters gives a 68.72% growth rate, meaning a $20000 to $24000 budget.

3) Also removing an earlier outlier (Q1 2003's dismal 1.42% growth) gives an average growth rate of 85.55%, meaning a $24000 to $29000 budget.

My spreadsheet is still a bit messy but I think the estimate is sound. Please check:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hardware_costs.pdf http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hardware_costs.sxc

I'm still working on getting these data in a more presentable form. The finance department also needs to come together so we can work on an annual budget and 5 year master plan. I could do this myself if our only expenses will be hardware related, but I imagine that we will want to expand the operations of the foundation. Thus we need to form policy on what we want to spend money on. I most certainly cannot do that alone.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS - I won't have hard numbers until Jimbo gets back and faxes me the last three months of bank statements, but we should have about $27,800 total ($9,400 in PayPal, $9000 server refund, $9000 award, and $400 misc.).

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