[Cadre-politics] [Fwd: Re: policy decision: giving up hosting]

[Dan MacNeil]

Chris is the guy that brought us

	/usr/local/sbin/ldapadmin

...among other useful things.
	
Like many competent people his main vices is too much humility 
and not enough sleep.

With permission, I forward his remarks below.

I'm going to pause my opinions for at least a week so my thinking 
  doesn't unduly pre-dispose other people's thoughts.


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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Cadre-politics] policy decision: giving up hosting
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:51:56 -0500
From: Christopher Sacca <csacca at thecsl.org>
To: Dan MacNeil <dan at thecsl.org>
References: <47B1C388.6010204 at thecsl.org>

Hey Dan, thought I might give my two cents.

I think that the personal service / QoS that the CSL
provides is an important and valuable service for NPOs.
That being said, I don't think that that means the CSL 
necessarily needs to physically host it's own services.
For instance, if Dreamhost and others are providing good web
hosting with high uptime at no costs to 501c3's, perhaps
the CSL should not provide physical web hosting. Another
option might be management of hosting for NPOs, i.e. you
are our costumers and we work with you and Dreamhost you get
you setup, we help you manage your website (uploading
content, dealing with technical stuff) in a friendly personal 
manner, but the actual hosting is done by Dreamhost.
This would still allow the ability to up-sell desktop
support services, while taking away the burden of day to
day maintenance of web servers.

I think that quality email hosting is a very important
service that the CSL provides, however Google Apps for
Your Domain, provides GMail, Calendar, Docs, etc. with
a 6GB (and growing) mailbox and google's spam filtering
all at no cost to 501c3's. Again, perhaps working more
in a support role here would be best.

Then again, I think the parallels you draw with Habitat
are very apt. Perhaps it's not so much about the efficiency
of the solution so much as the service provided to the
community by operating in and from a community. But still,
if we could provide more services, if we could concentrate
on MVHub, shouldn't we?

So I guess, in the end, I feel that the option of acting more as 
a proxy for hosting as opposed to doing it in house deserves some 
strong consideration. However I think that your arguments are
very persuasive and perhaps we should consider suboptimal 
solutions w.r.t. efficiency and concentrate more on providing 
value to the community.

Anyways, this is just my (sleep-deprived) opinion. Feel free to 
share it if you feel it holds merit.

Chris Sacca