User:Tmtoulouse/message

Thanks to everyone
First things first, you guys have done an amazing job with the fund raising efforts. I still remember a time when begging for $10 was difficult and in just over a month we have raised almost $500! Thank you so much to everyone, and you have done a great job. I have decided to end the fundraising a little early, and what follows is a discussion of why, and where we go from here.

New server
We are left now with decisions to make and an eye towards the future. The central question is always how best can RationalWiki set itself up to meet the needs of our users today, and to be prepared to meet the need for our future users. Right now our website is hosted with a company that has been a great provider, but we are pushing the resources available to us. If RationalWiki does not grow, or does not receive substantial spike traffic we can meet our needs with what we have now. But the problem is we are growing. There is a clear linear increase in our daily traffic, an increase in visits and an increase in unique visitors. Even now we are barely able to handle small spikes in traffic, and before long we won't be able to handle even our basic daily traffic.

We need more powerful hosting, and that leaves us with two options. Either pay for a dedicated server or build our own. The cost for renting a dedicated internet server is substantial. We are all ready paying close to $100 a month for what we have. For what we may need next year it could be $250-$300 a month! That is asking a lot from you guys, and from me, to support. The alternative is to build our own dedicated server. The one time cost is about $300, that one time payment nets us a permanent server that meets or exceeds all of the requirements of a high end rented dedicated server. It instantly triples our RAM, doubles our CPU cycles, and increases our disk space by a factor of 10. We get a substantial increase in what we can support for a small fraction of what renting server space will cost us.

Scalability is also made much easier. Do we need more RAM? I can provide that for $30, more hard disks? I can install another drive in our RAID for $80. It allows us to easily meet and expand for whatever the future holds.

But there is always a downside to everything. Moving to our own dedicated server means that we are 100 percent reliant on me for our up time. I would hope that I have proven myself a capable system administrator and that you trust me to be able to meet any challenge we are faced with. But if the power goes out, or a harddrive fails, or any other disaster. It is me and only me that can fix it. There is no army of techs and a huge redundancy array to keep things up 100 percent of the time.

Another issue along the same vein is that I am the sole source for the site. If something happens to me it is harder to recover from. At the moment if I were to get run over by a car crossing main street (and really, I should use the cross walk but I don't) than to keep RW alive all that would need to happen is transfer ownership of the rental agreement to someone else. With the move to a dedicated server things are not as easy. But it is not impossible. I will be using an online backup service to keep a backup of all the relevant files for the server. There are many reasons this is a good idea, but one practical consequence is that the site can easily be rebuilt anywhere by anyone that has the login information for the backup server. I will be sharing this with several long term established RW members so that if the worse case scenario happens and I disappear through death, kidnapping or alien abduction others can rebuild the site.

There are some monthly costs associated with the move to our own server, the first is the cost of establishing a static IP and enough bandwidth to support the site, and the second cost as I have mentioned is purchasing backup server space online. I estimate the monthly cost to be about $20-$30. This is substantially less than what we pay now and does not really increase as our site traffic increases. In fact, this amount could basically be covered by the google ads we have on the site, or by a smaller number of donations/pledges.

So we have a bit of a choice to make. We can keep the ads and eliminate the need to ask for money from you guys, or we can dump the ads and work towards getting a smaller monthly donation set. I am somewhat inclined to keep the ads, and drop all the begging for money, but feedback is welcome on this point.

The practical issues
The server is built and operational, right now RationalBeta points to the new server with a snap shot of RW installed. Please feel free to go poke around and see if there are any issues. As soon as I am convinced that everything is operational I plan to make the move to the new server.

In order to do this I will need to shut down RW for a bit while I transfer the database and files to the new server. I then need to change the DNS entries for the site to point to the new server. Total downtime for the site is likely to be between 3-24 hours depending on Murphy's Law and the length of time it takes for the DNS to update.

At the moment the move is roughly scheduled for shortly after January 1st. I am going home for a few weeks around the Holidays and don't want to make the move till I am back. When I have an exact date and time I will let everyone know.

Concluding remarks
I would like to say a little more, the fact that we are moving in this direction is proof of the concept of our site. We are succeeding and growing, and that is good thing! RationalWiki is the ultimate extension of Web 2.0, we have all the elements of social networking, wikis, blogs, aggregate sites, you name it, and combine it into what I think is one of the most enjoyable online communities I have been a part of. We are doing good work here and creating something worth while. Everyone who is reading this shares in this success and has my thanks for whatever role you have played. This website belongs to you, and my promise to you and everyone that becomes a part of this site is that I will continue to try and make the best possible decisions to offer the best possible infrastructure to keep us moving forward into the future. We all have skills and strengths to give to this project, and one of the best ones I can give is making sure that this project stays on the intertubes. With that in mind I really thing that this is the best possible step in keeping RationalWiki alive and well for the foreseeable future.

As always I am open to any suggestions, questions, feedback, or anything else.