brainstorm - donated hosting

[Christer Edwards <christer edwards gmail com>]

I don't know if this has been brought up before, but I thought I'd
throw it out there for discussion...

I have been thinking about the idea of contacting additional groups,
schools, hosting providers, etc regarding the idea of offering us
additional server space. For example, what if we (by "we" I mean the
board) contacted Linode and asked what they might be willing to donate
to the Foundation. Even a small VM with Linode could mirror services,
and allow for some improved redundancy. It seems we've been limited to
three providers (I don't know the reasons or history behind each), but
adding more offers us a lot of options.

Below are a bunch of benefits that I see, in no particular order:

donated VPS space saves the foundation money
VPS companies benefit from good PR by donating to the Foundation (plus
a tax write-off)
most VPS providers offer out of band console access, which is
something we don't have now
geographic diversity of services / mirrors
dozens (hundreds?) of schools and organizations mirror for
distributions, why not GNOME? (I don't just mean FTP)
round-robin DNS for mirroring (most of our sites would be easy to
mirror this way)
even short-term donations are beneficial for development environments, etc.

Even if the provider doesn't offer us a full VM, donated mirrored web
space would be nice. Again, distributed mirroring allows us to run
maintenance on our core transparently while the mirrors handle the
traffic.

I realize mirroring our sites and services is a little further down
the road, but this is a step toward that. I really am concerned about
some of our single points of failure, and I very much like the idea of
spreading out the load.

I don't know the full accuracy of this claim, but a Fedora contributor
offered to me that their expected downtime would be 4-6hrs should Red
Hat decide to pull the plug on the Fedora infrastructure. Consider the
same situation for the GNOME Foundation. I can't even imagine how much
trouble we'd be in.

I'd like to put together a list for the board of providers we might
contact and the main benefits each would provide. If anyone has any
suggestions, please get the conversation going.

Christer