Shifti.org, the on-line transformation story writing site I’ve written about and whose sysadmin I have interviewed, is currently down with a hard drive failure. As it is run largely as a personal project of its sysadmin, Daniel Hazelton, he depends on donations to keep the site running, and he had already been running a donation drive to pay the Internet bill. He’s going to need more money to fund a new hard drive, and there is currently a PayPal donation button on the site itself.
I realize not many of TeleRead’s readers are necessarily fans or even readers of Shifti, but I figured it was worth a mention here just in case anyone wanted to kick in a few dollars. Until Hazelton can get a new hard drive, none of the stories on Shifti will be accessible to anyone.
He should use the Amazon Cloud service instead. It’s far cheaper and easier to maintain than your own hardware. We cut our company’s costs from $15,000/month to $4,000/month.
If I had the money – either in income or from donations – to use the Amazon Cloud for hosting I’d do it in a heartbeat. The site, on average, uses over a gigabyte of bandwidth every month and was heading towards 10 gigabytes a month the last time I looked.
My problem right now is that my automated backup scripts have been repeatedly wedging for the past six months. So I have an ancient backup that is of no use – the hard drive is actually needed so that I can do an electronics transplant and rescue the data. If we can find a better hosting solution I will be happy to use it, but it cannot have any real expense. My finances are limited and the donations are a trickle at most times – so any recommendations of a better fix than rescuing the data and implanting a brand new hard drive would be welcome.