I'd like to open a discussion, very practical, about our medium-term hosting strategy. If you happen to be privy to any "inside information" (there isn't that much) then please be sure to anonymize the names of organizations that might be involved, since this is a public list. :-) What I need to do is prepare an internal document to important interested parties within the community (for example the leaders of the German verein, who have money to spend on their charitable goals, servers is fine for this), and I want to make sure that my overall plans are sensible from a tech point of view. Additionally, I am in talks with a great many organizations who are offering free hosting at various levels, and I need to know what makes sense for us in terms of how small or large each datacenter should be to meet our needs sensibly. While I of course welcome "big picture visionary" statements from people who don't know a lot about our actual network and challenges (we can learn from that), I'm mostly interested in extremely practical *here and now* feedback. The people who are actually involved in the day to day running of the site have a better feel for what makes sense than anyone else -- it is their advice which will carry the day. Here is the current situation -- Florida - 44-ish servers now, 20 more apache/squid machines to be installed within the next two weeks (10 already arrived and Chad will install very soon). 2 more database servers have been order, as well as a JBOD-thingy. Paris - 3 squids, soon to be 6 Yahoo -- datacenter in South Korea, I was just contacted by the tech person and he seeks guidance from us on the exact parameters. We're looking at 20U of apache/squid and 6U of db servers there -- this can probably be online in one or two months, maybe faster if we move fast and they move fast. :-) Belnet/Belgium -- 1 rack of space, unlimited bandwidth, they are ready to go Monday, they can do full hands-on, etc., including replacing borken hard drives and so on like that. They are excited to move forward quickly. In this case, we must supply the hardware. We can either buy hardware (with the German money?) or I can ask someone to buy it for us (see Big Company X, below). Amsterdam - a large NGO wants to do a big press announcement when I'm there in Holland at the end of this month. They are providing a set of servers which have already been ordered. I do not know the exact specifications, perhaps someone else can tell me? Big Company X - this company is prepared to make a very major commitment to hosting for us. Originally there were discussions of us being hosted in their facility, but now we are seeking bids on outsourcing this. The exact parameters are at this time very open ended, and I have told them that basically we need time to figure out what we need. They assure me there is no time pressure and they don't care about PR or anything else -- it's a pure charitable donation, no strings attached. But still I prefer to try to move quickly to take advantage of us just in case the corporate mood changes (you never know with big companies!). The parameters being discussed would be in the range of 2 full racks of servers, essentially a full replication of our Florida data center as of a couple of months ago. They are flexible on the amounts -- it is essentially whatever we need and can honestly justify. They are tech savvy and fully agree with my view that just throwing random money and servers at us is not the best use of our resources -- rather, they prefer that we ask for what we can really use in a way that optimizes the use of their money -- best strategy for everyone, obviously. SOOOOOOOOO...... Feedback? --Jimbo