[pianotech] real costs of running a listserv list

[paul bruesch]

You absolutely do not want the server located in someone's kitchen. Think
of the possibilities for flood, fire, dog peeing on it, power
outages/surges. You don't want a "young whippersnapper IT guy fresh out of
school" attending to it. You don't want a singular individual of any stripe
attending to it. True, the actual physical hardware requirements for the
processor are minimal, and bandwidth isn't phenomenal, but what about disk
failure? You need some sort of redundancy and regular or realtime backups.
You NEED that. It's not just a nice-to-have if you want (and you do)
reliability, dependability, integrity.

This is what hosting service providers provide.

As a related side note... I once hosted my own server from my home. It was
strictly for hobby, no customer data, no business website. But I did run a
mail server on it for my "regular" personal email, which I'd then
configured to forward to my gmail account. One day, some of my legitimate
email (which had been forwarded through my home server) started going to my
gmail spam folder. The next day more went to spam. By the third day, lots
of my legitimate email was going to spam. Gmail did not recognize my mail
server as being legitimate, so in order to maintain its own sense of
integrity, gmail dumped everything into my spam.

To reiterate a previous post, my vote is for the googlegroup... googletech,
if you will.

Paul Bruesch
Stillwater, MN


On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Paul McCloud <pmc033 at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Hi, Phil:
> Thanks for this information.  If the cost of the software is $850 a year,
> and there are, say, 100 core participants, then each of them will need to
> pay $8.50 a year.  I'm not sure if this is the actual cost, since we would
> need to inquire from Lars Nordstrom directly about our situation.
> Whether the server is located at someone's residence, or whether it's a
> commercially maintained server is the next question.  Reliability is key,
> in my opinion, so I'd vote a commercial server rather than someone's garage
> or bedroom, subject to power fluctuations, etc.  Add a yearly fee for that.
>  Setting it up, I think we can come up with someone, maybe Horace, or some
> young whippersnapper IT guy fresh out of school, a friend or ?  Doable.
> So, some costs are going to have to be borne by us in some amount to have
> our own list, separate from PTG.  We owe a lot to Andy Rudoff for bearing
> all the costs and effort involved with starting and maintaining the list
> for all those years.  Whether he had to pay $850 a year, well, we'd have to
> ask him about that.  At any rate, we will have to decide if we want to
> "own" the list, or just stay with Googlegroups.
> Paul McCLoud
> San Diego
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20130227/c57d2af7/attachment.htm>