No setup fees on new individual accounts. And there is no setup fee on pointing the domains.

I think I'm sold, though I wouldn't be able to switch for a month or two.

I don't know that that's necessarily a bad thing. It might be wise, if we proceed, to move this board first and do some tweaking before moving over a bunch of new accounts.

Good point.

I hope it's not rude of me to ask this, but why do you need a decision on b.org by Friday?

The deal that Steven and I made came with an expiration date. Therefore, I had to pass that deadline on to you guys.

Another option we should consider is iStrata. This is the new brand name for Netgate, the guys who have been hosting my web sites for the last five years or so.

I sent Netgate support an email asking about co-location or dedicated hosting and got this response from Kevin, the guy I've been dealing with ever since I became a customer of Netgate.

With the introduction of our dedicated server products co-location almost doesn't make sense. Most people want to colo some huge box that consumes (~5U) rack space. We still offer colo, although we have removed it from our site. The cost is $200.00 per month for 5U and 100K stream.

Compare that with our dedicated servers. We can offer you a 2.4Ghz box running Red Hat 7.3, 80GB HD, Plesk hosting control panel with a 100 domain license, fully automated software updates (in other words a fully managed server, both hardware and software with root access server), 1Mbps of bandwidth (billed at 95th percentile), and optional raid 1 for $129.00 a month.

We've been selling these servers to existing NetGate customers for about 6 months and everyone is extremely happy with them. You can take a look at our beta site at www.istrata.com (we're going to be marketing these under the iStrata name). Most of the information is correct, but we still have some work to do on the site. Let me know if you have questions.

If folks have questions, ask away and I'll forward them on to Kevin.

How do we make this decision by Friday? There isn't time for the usual voting process.

Considering this involves board architecture and viability issues, I'm willing to defer to the collective will of the Stompies about what option/course of action would be best. This strikes me as one of those situations we discussed when setting up the voting process in which technical issues affecting the good of the community as a whole might require faster response than the normal discussion/vote procedure allows for.

Unless I'm missing something, a change in hosting plans shouldn't change the way anything works for the board in terms of policy, it would just hopefully deal with our technical problems and involve an increase in cost to the board as a whole. Since funding is entirely by donation rather than a subscription setup, anyone objecting to the costlier plan would be perfectly free to continue contributing (or not) in the same amount as under the current plan.

I agree, but we should at least probably post an announcement in Press to the effect that this discussion is taking place.

I feel safe leaving this decision in Stompy hands, and I'm also willing to make a significant donation to the moving fund if it's needed. This place is certainly worth it to me.