It turns out that the release of Centos-3.3 was so popular, that it threw us way over the threshold of our ISP's, and now we are stuck with a _very_ large bill (as in an estimated 6TB of transfers). While in one hand I am ecstatic that we are so successful, but on the other hand, that is coming out of the developers pockets. The developers should be the last ones footing these bills (and this one was very large).
You can help. Please consider a donation for each of the systems that you are using. A reasonable donation we think starts at $12US per system per year. That money is only spent on infrastructure and development. $12 is much cheaper then a magazine subscription, and if everyone contributes their share, we will be able to grow our infrastructure to better handle our growing user base, and continue to provide software to the community.
Please visit http://www.caosity.org/contributing/ to do your part.
-----Original Message----- From: centos-admin@caosity.org [mailto:centos-admin@caosity.org] On Behalf Of Greg M. Kurtzer Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 10:33 AM To: centos@caosity.org; caos@caosity.org Subject: [Centos] Release of centos-3.3 ISP bill
It turns out that the release of Centos-3.3 was so popular, that it threw us way over the threshold of our ISP's, and now we are stuck with a _very_ large bill (as in an estimated 6TB of transfers). While in one hand I am ecstatic that we are so successful, but on the other hand, that is coming out of the developers pockets. The developers should be the last ones footing these bills (and this one was very large).
You can help. Please consider a donation for each of the systems that you are using. A reasonable donation we think starts at $12US per system per year. That money is only spent on infrastructure and development. $12 is much cheaper then a magazine subscription, and if everyone contributes their share, we will be able to grow our infrastructure to better handle our growing user base, and continue to provide software to the community.
Please visit http://www.caosity.org/contributing/ to do your part.
Greg M. Kurtzer
Greg,
1 - I will be glad to make a donation to your project. I would be happier using Paypal than entering my CC info on every site that has a donations policy. Any chance of you creating a PayPal account?
2 - As founder of www.contribs.org (SME Server) I ran into the bandwidth issue bigtime each time there was a release or upgrade. The solution we finally came to worked well for everyone.
We simply got a mirror at Ibiblio and a few others and then we rsync the appropriate directories over to the mirrors. All downloads happen at the mirror sites and the bandwidth that you have is reserved for the website.
Thanks to you and all the other folks who make it possible for us to lurk the lists and utilize your work product.
-Jeff Coleman
On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 10:43:48AM -0700, Jeff Coleman wrote:
Greg,
1 - I will be glad to make a donation to your project. I would be happier using Paypal than entering my CC info on every site that has a donations policy. Any chance of you creating a PayPal account?
Kintera (our donation management partner) used to take paypal donations, but don't seem to be doing that anymore. I am checking with them now.
2 - As founder of www.contribs.org (SME Server) I ran into the bandwidth issue bigtime each time there was a release or upgrade. The solution we finally came to worked well for everyone.
We simply got a mirror at Ibiblio and a few others and then we rsync the appropriate directories over to the mirrors. All downloads happen at the mirror sites and the bandwidth that you have is reserved for the website.
So our mirror list sorta accomplishes the same thing. These were hits though from mirrors, and from people hitting or syncing to mirror.caosity.org which is a rrdns pool of mirror servers that we maintain.
Thanks to you and all the other folks who make it possible for us to lurk the lists and utilize your work product.
:)
-----Original Message----- From: Greg M. Kurtzer [mailto:greg@runlevelzero.net] Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 11:05 AM To: Jeff Coleman Cc: centos@caosity.org; caos@caosity.org Subject: Re: [Centos] Release of centos-3.3 ISP bill
On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 10:43:48AM -0700, Jeff Coleman wrote:
Greg,
1 - I will be glad to make a donation to your project. I
would be happier
using Paypal than entering my CC info on every site that
has a donations
policy. Any chance of you creating a PayPal account?
Kintera (our donation management partner) used to take paypal donations, but don't seem to be doing that anymore. I am checking with them now.
Let me know....my credit card is itching :>
-jeff
On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 11:04:50AM -0700, Greg M. Kurtzer wrote:
On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 10:43:48AM -0700, Jeff Coleman wrote:
Greg,
1 - I will be glad to make a donation to your project. I would be happier using Paypal than entering my CC info on every site that has a donations policy. Any chance of you creating a PayPal account?
Kintera (our donation management partner) used to take paypal donations, but don't seem to be doing that anymore. I am checking with them now.
This has been fixed. The Kintera page now support using Paypal again. Please follow the normal contribute links, and on the Paypal page, there is a link (middle of page) with the payment options for Paypal payments.
Let me know how it works out.
Thanks!
Greg M. Kurtzer wrote:
So our mirror list sorta accomplishes the same thing. These were hits though from mirrors, and from people hitting or syncing to mirror.caosity.org which is a rrdns pool of mirror servers that we maintain.
Payment done. Thank you very much for all the hard work. I hope you can sort out the traffic problem. Maybe setup in a way that users can only download from mirrors, and only the mirrors can rsync from the main CentOS server? Or do you have to pay for traffic generated to mirrors as well?
Tom
I have received many emails regarding our mirror setup, and people asking more specifics about the amount of data transferred and the costs...
Configuration: We rent 3 systems at a colo, all of which come with 1TB of pre-payed for bandwidth. Each of these systems are part of a round robin DNS pool for mirror.caosity.org, and payed for by different members of our devel team. This is where all of our public Tier1 mirrors are supposed to sync from (http://caosity.org/download/mirrors/). Now we already know that _many_ more mirrors then what is listed on our mirror page are sync'ing from it, and individual computers are running yum against it. We thought that the 3TB provided by these mirrors would be sufficient to handle our traffic load. We were right 2-3 months ago. :/
Now,... I said an "estimated 6TB", and here is where I got the estimation. One system's owner is being charged for an _extra_ 1TB of data transfer. I have not heard from the the owners of the other 2 systems yet,... This is why it was an _estimation_ of 6TB. rrDNS is known for not implementing an even rotation (due to caching), so I wouldn't be surprised if the other systems have _slightly_ different numbers.
Here is the directory layout of mirror.caosity.org:
5.5G cAos-1 14G cAos-2 6.3G centos-2 31G centos-3
18G centos-3/3.1 14G centos-3/3.3
note: some repos include hard links
As cAos-2 is also new (but not released yet), it too would have been a contributor to the transfer load.
Usually I don't like to divulge finances as publicly as this, but considering the interest I have gotten I will let on to some numbers... The first bill was in generous excess of $500US. I would imagine that the other two bills will also be near that, putting the grand total somewhere around $1500US. Typically we spend $80US per system (which is reasonable), and this charge is ontop of that. The Foundation also has a rather substantial "I owe you" list to several of the developers which we are hoping will be paid back when/if we receive enough donations.
How to fix: We have always been throwing the idea around of blocking access to our primary mirrors and only letting through the Teir1 mirrors. We have not done that (yet) because of the potential of breaking the update stream to many systems (most yum.confs currently point to mirror). Another solution is to get more systems to put into our mirror rrDNS pool. Or we can find someone willing to host a very large temporary mirror for new releases and point people there. We will be discussing these issues and more in IRC #caos for anyone that wish to provide thoughts or input.
I hope that clears up some confusion. :)
Thank you for all of the interest and ideas that this has sparked. I am sorry if I don't respond directly to each of them, but I think I answered all of the questions that were asked of me in this email. Let me know if I missed something.
On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 10:32:32AM -0700, Greg M. Kurtzer wrote:
It turns out that the release of Centos-3.3 was so popular, that it threw us way over the threshold of our ISP's, and now we are stuck with a _very_ large bill (as in an estimated 6TB of transfers). While in one hand I am ecstatic that we are so successful, but on the other hand, that is coming out of the developers pockets. The developers should be the last ones footing these bills (and this one was very large).
You can help. Please consider a donation for each of the systems that you are using. A reasonable donation we think starts at $12US per system per year. That money is only spent on infrastructure and development. $12 is much cheaper then a magazine subscription, and if everyone contributes their share, we will be able to grow our infrastructure to better handle our growing user base, and continue to provide software to the community.
Please visit http://www.caosity.org/contributing/ to do your part.
Greg M. Kurtzer http://runlevelzero.net/ http://caosity.org/ http://warewulf-cluster.org/ _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@caosity.org http://lists.caosity.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
How about making the primary download of "NEW RELEASES" to be bittorrent. And put a limit on the amount that can be downloaded via ftp or http (if that is something you can do with your current setup). Let the people that are downloading share in the process and make things much easier on your servers, bandwidth and bank account.
Chris
Greg M. Kurtzer wrote:
I have received many emails regarding our mirror setup, and people asking more specifics about the amount of data transferred and the costs...
Configuration: We rent 3 systems at a colo, all of which come with 1TB of pre-payed for bandwidth. Each of these systems are part of a round robin DNS pool for mirror.caosity.org, and payed for by different members of our devel team. This is where all of our public Tier1 mirrors are supposed to sync from (http://caosity.org/download/mirrors/). Now we already know that _many_ more mirrors then what is listed on our mirror page are sync'ing from it, and individual computers are running yum against it. We thought that the 3TB provided by these mirrors would be sufficient to handle our traffic load. We were right 2-3 months ago. :/
Now,... I said an "estimated 6TB", and here is where I got the estimation. One system's owner is being charged for an _extra_ 1TB of data transfer. I have not heard from the the owners of the other 2 systems yet,... This is why it was an _estimation_ of 6TB. rrDNS is known for not implementing an even rotation (due to caching), so I wouldn't be surprised if the other systems have _slightly_ different numbers.
Here is the directory layout of mirror.caosity.org:
5.5G cAos-1 14G cAos-2 6.3G centos-2 31G centos-3
18G centos-3/3.1 14G centos-3/3.3
note: some repos include hard links
As cAos-2 is also new (but not released yet), it too would have been a contributor to the transfer load.
Usually I don't like to divulge finances as publicly as this, but considering the interest I have gotten I will let on to some numbers... The first bill was in generous excess of $500US. I would imagine that the other two bills will also be near that, putting the grand total somewhere around $1500US. Typically we spend $80US per system (which is reasonable), and this charge is ontop of that. The Foundation also has a rather substantial "I owe you" list to several of the developers which we are hoping will be paid back when/if we receive enough donations.
How to fix: We have always been throwing the idea around of blocking access to our primary mirrors and only letting through the Teir1 mirrors. We have not done that (yet) because of the potential of breaking the update stream to many systems (most yum.confs currently point to mirror). Another solution is to get more systems to put into our mirror rrDNS pool. Or we can find someone willing to host a very large temporary mirror for new releases and point people there. We will be discussing these issues and more in IRC #caos for anyone that wish to provide thoughts or input.
I hope that clears up some confusion. :)
Thank you for all of the interest and ideas that this has sparked. I am sorry if I don't respond directly to each of them, but I think I answered all of the questions that were asked of me in this email. Let me know if I missed something.
On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 10:32:32AM -0700, Greg M. Kurtzer wrote:
It turns out that the release of Centos-3.3 was so popular, that it threw us way over the threshold of our ISP's, and now we are stuck with a _very_ large bill (as in an estimated 6TB of transfers). While in one hand I am ecstatic that we are so successful, but on the other hand, that is coming out of the developers pockets. The developers should be the last ones footing these bills (and this one was very large).
You can help. Please consider a donation for each of the systems that you are using. A reasonable donation we think starts at $12US per system per year. That money is only spent on infrastructure and development. $12 is much cheaper then a magazine subscription, and if everyone contributes their share, we will be able to grow our infrastructure to better handle our growing user base, and continue to provide software to the community.
Please visit http://www.caosity.org/contributing/ to do your part.
Greg M. Kurtzer http://runlevelzero.net/ http://caosity.org/ http://warewulf-cluster.org/ _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@caosity.org http://lists.caosity.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
I have been a member of CommunityColo (aka 'CCCP') in the past, and it worked very well for me for about 2 years. Perhaps another solution path to take a look at:
-te
Greg M. Kurtzer wrote:
It turns out that the release of Centos-3.3 was so popular, that it threw us way over the threshold of our ISP's, and now we are stuck with a _very_ large bill (as in an estimated 6TB of transfers). While in one hand I am ecstatic that we are so successful, but on the other hand, that is coming out of the developers pockets. The developers should be the last ones footing these bills (and this one was very large).
You can help. Please consider a donation for each of the systems that you are using. A reasonable donation we think starts at $12US per system per year. That money is only spent on infrastructure and development. $12 is much cheaper then a magazine subscription, and if everyone contributes their share, we will be able to grow our infrastructure to better handle our growing user base, and continue to provide software to the community.
Please visit http://www.caosity.org/contributing/ to do your part.
-
Chris Hammond -
Greg M. Kurtzer -
Jeff Coleman -
Tom DE BLENDE (GCC) -
Troy Engel