[Centos] Release of centos-3.3 ISP bill

Wed Oct 27 14:10:20 UTC 2004

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 at caosity.org
> http://lists.caosity.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

-- 
Greg M. Kurtzer
http://runlevelzero.net/
http://caosity.org/
http://warewulf-cluster.org/