Hi there,

There's a special at our hoster at the moment to get a major speed and RAM boost for about twice the monthly spend. This would take us from a previous generation 8 CPU, 512 MB RAM, 30 GB VPS to a 4 CPU brand spanker with ridiculously high bandwidth limits, 4 GB of RAM and 250 GB of disk space.

At $109 USD per month, there are insufficient sponsors to fund this service improvement, so I'm gauging potential interest. There's no rush on this - I have plenty of other things to work on, and we don't have to do this at all to survive!

Of those specs, realistically, it's the RAM that helps us most of all; Aussieveedubbers has a working set of about 1 GB in terms of active threads and attachments, and it would be nice to have more in memory to speed things up.

I am interested in if you'd be interested in moving your hosting (or even starting your hosting) with us, and if you were to move, how much you'd be prepared to pay. An important part of this is payment reliability - if I could guarantee 10 folks paying on time every month, we could do this today. The reality is that the dog quite often eats the PayPal login, and so we would need a much larger pool of potential subscribers than just 10. Have a think about it, and if you're interested, please vote.

Shared hosting costs about $40-50 per month in Australia depending on ISP and configuration, but often has ridiculously low bandwidth, CPU, RAM, and HD limits, if it's offered at all. Check out your ISP to see if they offer it and if so, how much it costs.

You would have:

* Access to the Plesk control panel as a domain owner. You don't need to know much about Unix to manage your system. Check this out:

https://plesk9.demo.parallels.com:8443/login_up.php3?passwd=panel&login_l...

Features:

* 2 Fast CPU's
* At least 1 GB of traffic per month (probably more)
* Sharing our memory (4GB) and I/O to the SAN
* PHP, MySQL, and Linux - run whatever apps you want
* 1 IP address shared with others on this system
* Web, E-Mail and DNS can be managed via Plesk
* Help from me to set up your site and any help required to keep it running within reason.

You might want this if you want to run your own blog or domain like I do ( http://www.greebo.net ). If you are a small business, I can help you out on a best efforts basis - the same basis that I give myself to look after my and my wife's blog. I don't have the time or resources to be a proper commercial provider for businesses - if you need that, please go to Crucial, Web Central, Macquarie Telecom et al.

I'm capping the poll questions at $40 per month as basically at that price point you can get the same thing from your ISP, albeit with much less bandwidth.

Well, with three folks interested, I think that answers the non-burning question du semaine.

We might revisit this again next year.

thanks,
Andrew