19 Dec
2010
19 Dec
'10
7:15 a.m.
On 12/17/2010 11:02 AM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
At 7:12 AM -0200 12/17/10, Alexandre Souza - Listas
wrote:
Is it dead from lack of postings, or lack of
connectivity/hardware/bandwidth/etc. Maybe I'm a bit thick, but it's not
clear (to me) what the exact issue is and if it's "worth" moving to a
new hosting site.
If the latter, and it wasn't a "large" list, I'd be happy to host it on
one of my servers... I don't have access to a lot of bandwidth, so it
wouldn't be insanely fast, but it would be stable.
As some of you may know, Yahoo is flopping. And
much of the lists of
the world are on yahoo servers.
Oh, not a good thought... :-( My main lists these days (all Photography
related) are hosted on Yahoo servers. :-(
I still think these lists should run in private
servers. Everyone
though of Yahoo as a reliable company, that "would just never dies".
This is another nail on the coffin. Everything can happen - AND
HAPPENS - with a company like yahoo.
This is the way it used to be, there are reasons why almost all lists,
are now hosted on Yahoo (how many besides this one are hosted
elsewhere). I can think of one other list I'm still on that is hosted by
someone other than Yahoo, and it has been dead for about 2 months now (I
forget how long it was dead the last time). I've personally resisted the trend towards
web-based BBS's, but there
are five of those I have accounts on, as they're the only way to
exchange data on those subjects. Personally I prefer email lists, and
consider them the most efficient means of exchanging information.
As do I.
My hope is that if Yahoo finishes crumbling,
they'll sell off their mail
lists to another company. This is how they got them in the first place.
Remember it used to be "One List". One of the Yahoo lists I'm on started
out on Fidonet!
I was never on Fidonet, but with the way the current interwebs is going
(spam, popups, etc.) I've been contemplating what it would take to set
up a new Fidonet (or at least Fidonet-like) system - I would happily
host a node on something like that.
You now have me wondering if I shouldn't look into
a hardware upgrade
capable of running mail lists. I have the network capacity, just not the
hardware capacity. Honestly though I have no desire to provide such a
service.
What type of scope are you thinking -- a few lists like this, or
replicating Yahoo's scale? I host a classic computing related list[1] on
my personal DSL line - about 200 subscribers, it can get fairly active
at times (20-30 messages per day) -- but I also host 3 or 4 email
domains with 10+ users each (including webmail) and I can still play WoW
without (too many) hiccups[2].
[1] A list dedicated to Kyocera 80c85 based laptops - Tandy Model
100/102/200's / NEC 8200/8300's / Olivetti M10 / etc.
[2] Is hiccough no longer a word? Spellcheck doesn't like it... ;-)
The list is hosted on a 2.4GHz P4 with 512Meg RAM, and it hosts all the
email/web/DNS/logging/etc. necessary for the domains I host, and doesn't
break a sweat. I doubt it *could* as I only have 3Mbit down and 512Kbit
up; the network would get hosed long before the hardware would be stressed.
Depending on the scope of what you want to offer (archives, etc.) I
would think that you could host a great many lists on modest hardware if
you have the bandwidth available... but that's just me.
It would be interesting to see the ratio of resources that Yahoo
dedicated to its lists compared to all of its other services (flickr,
websearch, etc.).
Laterz!
Roger "Merch" Merchberger