Felt it would be fair to forward on the most recent message I've received from ibiblio:
Nick,
We ran across the wikitech-l thread about ibiblio hosting and found it quite interesting. I hope you don't read this as an intrusion, but I'd like to offer more details on the systems side of ibiblio. I'm one of the systems engineers here and can give a techie perspective.
Many large, independent sites have similar discussions when considering moving to ibiblio. Some moved, some decided to stay on their own systems. Either way is fine with us as long as everyone's happy. Some sites move their web/db content and retain their own mail servers. A drawback for some is that we manage the systems and don't provide co-lo services.
Concerning performance of the ibiblio site, one person mentioned gentoo downloads. Part of the challenge of having so much content available is the outgoing bandwidth. We use traffic shaping software to keep it under control. As a result, Linux distribution download traffic is given a lower priority than the main web site content. When judging performance, http page load speed for www.ibiblio.org might be a better example. db.etree.org is heavily mysql driven, so you could check that out, too.
You might find this set of pages interesting: http://www.ibiblio.org/systems/ The system status page has a real-time (almost) network traffic graph.
Also, we're close to moving the site to an LVS cluster and upgrading our database systems. That should greatly improve capacity.
But you guys should certainly do what best meets your needs. We're happy to help provide useful and interesting content in any capacity.
Thanks,
-jrr