Sorry everyone,
I forgot that I was secretary this last week!
Ryan asked for $300 to pay for virtualized hosting so we can improve the website’s stability. This should be enough for website hosting and backups for one year.
Sorry about the delay,
Jon
guys I have hosting, that is never going to change, let me know what you PHP on a Linux shared host will do the trick. No cost required, consider it a gift from one of your founders
Starbuck -
I appreciate the offer, and we can certainly discuss folding any hosting that members wish to provide into the Hive’s available infrastructure. I know Ian W. was moving his servers into a datacenter and intending to prove some access to those as well. With this vote however, I’m trying to improve the situation we’re in with our current hosting. It’s also donated to us by a founder, but it’s not robust in the way that virtualized hosting with an Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, or similar can be.
All -
For those not at last week’s meeting, let me explain the purpose for the budget being requested in tomorrow’s vote. I’m asking to pre-approve expenditures of up to $300 on virtual hosting, to cover approximately the next year of use.
This will be used for three things.
For those unfamilar with the expense patterns of cloud hosting, virtual servers effectively begin at $5/mo, but are in reality billed by the minute as used. In addition to steady state hosting expenses which will be well under the requested amount, this allows the flexibility of bringing servers online as needed on a moment’s notice. My intent is to pay for any such use out of pocket initially, then seek reimbursement monthly or quarterly from the pre-approved budget.
I realize the Hive has offers of freely available hosting from multiple sources, but these lack the stability provided by a major datacenter with a 24/7 support staff. They also lock us into a limited number of servers, and all the difficulties that come along with hardware failure at small scale.
The payoff in flexibility and the sheer simplicity provided by abstracting away from physical servers is more than worth the nominal costs, in my opinion. Hive13 is firmly established now, and I suggest that it may be time to stop cobbling our Internet services together with batch files and bailing wire. 
Please let me know if there are any questions about the above.
I’m running on dreamhost, you can have a VPS if you need it, I’ve had the account since 1997. I’m grandfathered in on an ancient unlimited plan, and they love me. Do you really think the hive needs 99.999% uptime? 99.9% would be better than blackboard.uc.edu was when I ran it (we ran a 99% SLA, LOL)
My offer stands.