After playing around with aD's problem sets, I've grown to love ACS and AOLServer =) My previous post suggested that we might be moving our servers out of our current ISP (Concentric) and into Above or Exodus. But after doing some more research I found that Above and Exodus provide a marginally better service. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I heard that there are still the weekly network hiccups at these two providers.
I spent the past week bitching to Concentric about the poor network connectivity and they finally did something about it. I don't want to jinx it, but it seems like they fixed the issues that were causing our network latency. I'm crossing my fingers. Their network wasn't all that bad. The downtime was about 15 min to 1/2 hour once a week. Since we don't depend on the connection for income, the downtimes were just an annoyance.
Okay, so why am I tell you this? Well, previously, I suggested that we would be willing to open our boxes and rack space to anyone who wanted to use ACS/pg. I was a little reluctant at first due to the network issues at Conecentric. I even turned away some people because of this problem. Moving to Above or Exodus would be too expensive for most of the users of ACS/pg, seeing that the user didn't choose ACS/Oracle =P.
So I'd like to re-open our offer to host ACS/pg sites. We will have several choices:
1. Share a server with other users
2. Use one of our dedicated server in our rack space
3. Put your own server in our rack space
Option 1 will be cheap. My guess is that we could provide an IP address, DNS entry at nameserver.concentric.com, email addresses, and bandwidth for $70-90/month. I haven't worked out the numbers yet but it should be around that area.
Option 2 and 3 will obviously by more expensive. Our current rackspace cost is $150 for each server. Bandwidth is included in that cost. If there is enough interest, we will have to move to a cage or a vault and get more bandwidth. The total cost will probably be around $250/month for Option 2 and $200/month for Option 3.
Option 2 would be one of our custom built PCs. We can build it to your specification using your favorite OS (we like Linux and Solaris 8/Intel). We will own this server, but you will be free to use it as if it was your. The benefit of Option 2 is that you don't have to pay for the hardware.
Option 3 would be one of your servers. This is geared toward people who want to use other hardware such as a Sparc box or who want to own their own boxes. In both of these options, we will take care of the hardware and do upgrades or repairs for you.
In all options we will deal with the co-location facility whichever we end up using.
Feel free to contact me if you are interested. Thanks.
