One fine day, Brion Vibber said:
Do feel free to ask other free projects and universities if they'd be interested in supporting the project...
I thought it might be a good idea to ask, so I sent out an email to ibiblio:
Greetings - my name is Nick, and I help out with a site called Wikipedia. (http://www.wikipedia.org). It is a free, multi-lingual project to create a complete, accurate, and more importantly open content encyclopedia. All of the content is licensed under the GNU FDL (GFDL), meaning that anybody has the freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifications, either commercially or non-commercially - although they may not put in place technical measures to conceal the content.
The English language Wikipedia has over 117 thousand articles already, and by our calculations, we have about half the content of the Encyclopedia Britannica. We have many other languages, which are also quickly growing in size and diversity.
However, we are currently facing both a budget and capacity crunch. In short, we have neither. Since Wikipedia is a volunteer based program, it is hard for us to raise the funds to purchase additional hardware. Right now, we are running off of a dual Athlon 1800+ server with 2GB of RAM and 36GB of SCSI storage. Unfortunately, the system is being pushed to its absolute limits, with little relief in sight. We are installing a second system this weekend as a front end, but even with that, we are not sure how long we can hold out. The dual Athlon system runs at a typical load of 15-20 during normal US working hours.
Since our mission seems to be very much inline with ibiblio's mission, I was wondering if there was any way that Wikipedia could be hosted by ibiblio? It would be a great help to our project and the community.
Thanks!
Much to my surprise, they replied:
hi nick,
we would LOVE to host wikipedia.org. our only concern is with the additional load wikipedia might put on our mysql server. BUT... if you could possibly hold off moving the site for two weeks or so john and fred will have us up on our new hardware - we're moving to a web cluster and will have a much more powerful database machine.
if this is acceptable to you, please check out http://www.ibiblio.org/faq/ for more information about our setup, and just drop me a list of what accounts, dbs, unix groups, web directories, etc and we'll go from there. just let me know?
thanks, donald www.ibiblio.org formerly known as SunSITE 919.843.8215 and stoof.
Seems like a good deal to me. We should probably tell them that they should keep our database on a seperate MySQL server, as it will absolutely demolish just about anything they make available.
Anyways, if somebody who knows the server requirements, layout, and other what-not wants to let Donald and/or the list know, that would be awesome (assuming that Brion is still interested in having someone else host the site). Having ibiblio make all the outlays seems like a good deal to me (plus, they're a non-profit org, so you could likely make tax-deductable donations to them).
Anyways, that's that. :)