Re: Brossow?
Originally posted by arn
It's actually not quite that easy...
Web server hosting tends to be more costly... and you can't just translate "one time" costs of a home machine over to a server.
You can co-locate a server... in that you can purchase a full machine and have it hosted at a location, but then you have to maintain it yourself, and the burden of software maintainence and hardware failures is on you. Plus, you're still paying hundreds of dollars a month on colocation/bandwidth.
Leasing a dedicated server is more managable... but hosting costs for dedicated servers start at $99 -- but once you start adding bandwidth and backup capacity, it quickly elevates. MacRumors hosting was close to $600-700/month at one point -- and that was without a backup solution at all.
Plus - many of these sites -- like MacUpdate are started as individually run sites rather than company funded sites. As bandwidth and traffic increases, costs tend to be coming out of pocket for many webmasters. MacMusic.org, for example, is planning on closing due to too much popularity... they can't cover their hosting costs. Adding another $100/month or so for a good backup system on top of losing money is not something that some people can do.
In the end - yes, "real" businesses should spend what it takes... but with websites, many can be individually funded sites which make additional expenses more problematic.
arn
No need to tell me about the costs involved with managing servers; it's part of what I do for a living. (I manage several servers -- more than six but fewer than a dozen -- in multiple locations. My budgets for the various locations are SEVERELY limited, yet in not one case would we lose more than a few hours' data and we'd have the affected server back up in minutes. Backup and recovery are simply part of the cost of having a server; it's not an option.) What I also know quite well is the cost of not properly backing up servers. Regardless of the cost of a proper backup system, what is the cost of rebuilding an entire site from scratch? From the limited information I've seen about this specific failure, an additional drive with some sort of mirroring would have saved hours of downtime and presumably considerable human time and effort, not to mention the bad image it projects when a simple drive failure takes down your service for an inordinate amount of time -- a bad image not just to your users but also to your advertisers. I don't know what their hosting situation is, but despite everything you've said, I don't think the downtime was necessary:
1. CoLo -- follow one of my previous suggestions and you're back up and running within five minutes of getting to the CoLo.
2. Leasing -- who would consider leasing without a backup solution in place? If you can't guarantee the security of all your time and labor, why bother?
Either way, if the business model doesn't include a provision for data backup and disaster recovery, there's a fundamental flaw in the plan. To me, this is the same thing as typing up your doctoral dissertation without ever saving the document, just leaving the computer running 24/7 until you're done and hoping that the power doesn't go out and that the computer doesn't crash before you can print it out. Sure, it might work for awhile but odds are eventually you're going to be sorry.
I won't belabor this further. I've said all I can say. It doesn't matter. For their sake, I hope the folks at MacUpdate learn something from this and come up with a better system.