This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------78BF647258AFE92ED5857E37 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit FYI --------------78BF647258AFE92ED5857E37 Content-Type: message/rfc822 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Received: from bl-30.rootsweb.com (bl-30.rootsweb.com [207.113.245.30]) by franklin.lisco.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA14691 for <njennings@lisco.net>; Sat, 26 Dec 1998 18:47:34 -0600 (CST) Received: (from slist@localhost) by bl-30.rootsweb.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA28148; Sat, 26 Dec 1998 16:44:27 -0800 (PST) Resent-Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1998 16:44:27 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <199812270047.QAA15406@bl-5.rootsweb.com> Old-To: Carol C-H <cch@netdoor.com> Old-cc: TEAM-ROOTSWEB-L@rootsweb.com, "Dr. Brian Leverich" <leverich@rootsweb.com> Reply-to: "Dr. Brian Leverich" <leverich@rootsweb.com> Subject: Re: Income needed In-reply-to: Your message of Sat, 26 Dec 1998 17:38:19 CST. <199812262339.RAA26068@netdoor.com> Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1998 16:47:44 -0800 From: Brian Leverich <leverich@rootsweb.com> Resent-Message-ID: <"EE1PO.A.N3G.nLYh2"@bl-30.rootsweb.com> To: TEAM-ROOTSWEB-L@rootsweb.com Resent-From: TEAM-ROOTSWEB-L@rootsweb.com X-Mailing-List: <TEAM-ROOTSWEB-L@rootsweb.com> archive/latest/804 X-Loop: TEAM-ROOTSWEB-L@rootsweb.com Precedence: list Resent-Sender: TEAM-ROOTSWEB-L-request@rootsweb.com -- Your message was: (from "Carol C-H") > Brian - I just realized that the post I sent asking for the cost > of these projects was sent to you privately rather than to the > list. Please excuse. OK, I've estimated costs below. > Also - if people wanted to contribute to one of these projects, so > that the money would be available when the time came that it could > be done, would that be possible? I am thinking that if people > researching Washington state wanted special contributions > earmarked for those, or if there were cousins who wanted to > contribute specifically toward the acquisition of census film and > the scanner, would there be a possibility of establishing a fund > for same that could be kept separate from other funds contributed? Arrgh. Something you need to understand about RootsWeb is that we support hundreds of thousands of users for just pennies apiece per month. Even if every single one of our users was a member, we'd be receiving less than 5% (yes, only *five* percent) of what a typical ISP receives from each of its users. What that means is that we do not now have and will never have in the future the ability to handle "special cases". We couldn't begin to maintain separate funds for separate projects; the costs of managing that and providing customer support for people who change their minds and such would kill us. Moreover, I don't know what we'd do if folks contributed $10,000 towards a $45,000 microfilm scanner and then stopped; would we refund the $10,000? Sorry to sound panicky, but one of the things that scares the sysadmins here more than anything else is that nobody in the user community seems to understand what it *means* to support people on pennies per month. We don't have customer support people, we don't have accounting staff, we have toy hardware that requires constant nursing, we don't even have enough staff to answer our own email -- there are 10,000 users out there writing us for every admin that we have available to answer the mail. *sigh* Sorry about that long digression. (: But seriously, any plan that involves increasing administrative complexity at RootsWeb is a nonstarter. We just don't have the resources. > At 01:35 PM 12/26/98 -0800, Brian Leverich wrote: > > > >First, Karen and Tim and the listowners are ready and waiting for > >upgrades to the "lists2" mailing list server and a new "lists3" > >server that we can tune especially to handle the very large lists. > > > >The effect of upgrading "lists2" and adding "lists3" is that we can > >continue adding lists while keeping our average delivery time down > >in the few-seconds range. This is around $11,000. > > ### > > > >Second, Randy, Dale, the USGenWeb Archives/Census projects, and the > >listowners could use a second search engine server because the > >current server is out of disk space (and can't be upgraded) and is > >out of CPU capacity (and can't be upgraded), too. > > > >Adding a second search engine server would allow the USGenWeb and > >mailing list archives to keep growing, and should make searches > >significantly faster. This is around $16,000-24,000, depending on how we configure the server. > > ### > > > >Everyone would enjoy faster lists and faster Web pages if we had > >more bandwidth. We can add bandwidth with a single telephone call, > >but we incur significant new costs when we make that call. This is around $4,000 every month. Cheers, B. ------------------ -- Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative http://www.rootsweb.com/ P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 leverich@rootsweb.com --------------78BF647258AFE92ED5857E37--