[wplug-board] Linode cost information

[Pat Barron]

On 8/23/2012 10:12 AM, Michael Loomis wrote:
> I was thinking of the cost of putting up a blog. If I understand Pat 
> correctly we require more support than a blog would and this justifies 
> our greater expense?

Yeah, there's more going on behind the scenes on the server than might 
be obvious, beyond hosting "mostly static" content (such as a blog would 
be).

Mediawiki requires Apache and a database on the back end (we use 
MySQL).  Mailing list and alias management and spam filtering (using 
mailman, postfix, and postgrey) also runs on the server.  Monkeybot runs 
on the server (for whatever that may be worth...).  It's used to store 
various WPLUG organizational information (in addition to what's in the 
Mediawiki wiki).  Plus, as discussed at the last board meeting, we also 
plan to explore plugging a future online payment capability into Apache.

For the way we're using it, we really pretty much need a full-blown 
server; we need more flexibility than we'd get with (for instance) just 
a hosted Wordpress blog - even if we abandoned all the other 
capabilities of having our own server, at minimum we'd need to find 
somewhere that would host our Mediawiki instance, plus probably a 
separate service to host/manage our mailing lists.  (And, I'm actually 
not aware of anyone who hosts Mediawiki as a "canned" service.)

The most economical way to go would be to have our own hardware, and 
find a sympathetic soul who'd be willing to co-locate it in their data 
center for us for free.  But, of course, that puts you at the mercy of 
that organization suddenly deciding, "You know what, we've decided we're 
not doing this anymore...", particularly if whoever our advocate is 
inside that organization happens to leave.

--Pat.
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