Jens Frank wrote:
You said something else earlier today, that we shouldn't spend the money just because we have it. Being tight-fisted, I somewhat have a problem with "overdelivery". Redundancy is fine, we need it. Having a spare server on site is probably cheaper than a service contract. But 3? Please, someone covince me that we won't find a better way to spend the money in half a year.
I hear what you're saying. With the right scalable architecture, adding capacity in the future should be as easy as adding a new server or two, copying over some software, and editing a few config files. It seems obvious that buying too much hardware too early is not good, because cheaper and better hardware will be available 6 months from now.
Even so, I don't want us to be too stingy. What I'm hearing loud and clear is that people want wikipedia to be fast, highly responsive, and reliable. We don't want to be sketchy about reaching those goals, we want to embrace those goals wholeheartedly and make sure we aren't sitting on money in the bank while the site lags.
--Jimbo