[NCUC Finance] Hosting the NCUC E-Platform

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:01:06PM +0100, William Drake (william.drake at uzh.ch) wrote:

> On Feb 20, 2013, at 22:22, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:

> > One must be careful of ongoing expenditures, especially if they
> > lock us in to anything that would be costly to get out of, but
> > $400/year is certainly not out of reach.

> > It does seem a bit high (without knowing the requirements) as the
> > current Ning site is $235/year but if VPS does something that
> > normal hosting doesn't, I am sure you can convince EC to approve
> > it.

> Wilson and Tapani, were there other vendors/options? Agree with MM a
> little more detail/background wouldn't I hurt for an ongoing
> expenditure, even if it's less for a decade than we spend at a time
> on other stuff.

We did not do a formal comparison of vendors, it was felt
unnecessary due to the relatively small amount involved and
the fact that we already are using Gandi for DNS registration
so using it for hosting as well avoids extra work in account
management. But we did discuss the features we wanted
(listed in Wilson's document) and we're well enough aware of
the market situation to know Gandi is cheap for what they offer.

We could cut down on the $400 figure, however, by settling on a less
powerful VPS. The smallest available VPS at Gandi would be about
$170/year or $16/month (or $0.53/day!), and if you want to keep
tighter rein on the expenditure we could start with that.
It would probably to run out of power pretty soon though if we get
around to doing all we've been planning to, but it would be enough to
get us started and buying more oomph in small chunks only as needed
is of course possible, even down to daily basis if desired.
The downside there would be the extra time required to manage it
and to process and approve the bills piecemeal.
So I guess it boils down to how much people's time is worth, how
small amounts merit a separate decision in the EC, how much time
the sysadmins need to spend to monitor the machine and adjust
it as needed, &c.

One possibly money-saving alternative would be for the EC to authorize
expenditure of up to a certain amount, like that $400, but
recommending that it be used cautiously, buying more power bit by bit
as the need arises. That way it would only use up e-team's and
Milton's time rather than EC's and could be done faster.
That's actually a good reason for having some pre-approved
budget not spent at once, we might have an unexpected peak
in bandwitdh or something we'd like to react to fast
(maybe some outreach effort explodes our popularity and
we get a billion people hitting our site at once...)

But, since we're just starting to work out new processes here,
I would be OK with going slowly: as I said that $170 would be
enough to get us started, just don't be surprised when the
e-team asks for more later.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen