On Mon, 2004-01-26 at 14:17, Tim Potter wrote:
> Looks great. Nice new features.
>
> Can you tell us if there's any chance that addtl. AFS space pricing will
> get more in line with current industry pricing for web hosting prices? I
> recently setup a friend with a web hosting account w/ a vendor and he's
> getting 1 GB of space for $4.95/ month which is less a 1/3 the price that
> is quoted for MSU staff/ faculty to get an addtl. 1 gb of space. Current
> hard drive pricing is so cheap now I don't understand why the MSU AFS
> prices haven't been dropped.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Tim
I don't have any say in AFS pricing, I'm just the guy working on the web
pages... ;)
A few things I can think of that might factor into the cost:
- Does MSU want to be in the business of providing space, or is it
something that we only want to do in a limited fashion? If the latter,
high pricing might be a good way to discourage people... If the former,
then the whole service would need to be oriented more toward making a
profit and less toward providing a "free" service to
students/faculty/staff.
- What sort of redundancy and backup need to be provided? More of
either means higher cost. Right now there's snapshot.afs in each user's
home directory that provides online backups, at the expense of requiring
more total storage space.
- What sort of technical limitations are there that affect storage
density? Size of disks, number of disks per server, bandwidth per
server, etc. all factor in. (Currently there are something like 30 AFS
servers, and all the individual disks are in the 9-36GB range...)
- What is the support cost of that space? Given that current financial
situation at MSU (and everywhere in education), if it's not making
money, then it's costing money to support...
- What is the transaction cost in selling disk space in 1GB increments?
Somehow the paperwork needs to be tracked and the accounts billed, the
disks need to be ordered and installed, etc.
- What is the demand for extra space? If there's not a lot, then
there's no economies of scale in handling it, and the costs will be
higher because of that.
- What alternatives are already available on campus? Department file
servers, colleges (like Engineering) providing some space, throwing up a
Linux server in your office or sharing a directory on your workstation,
etc.
I don't know if that answers your question or not, but I hope it
helps... =)
-ED
--
Edward Glowacki [log in to unmask]
A PBS mind in an MTV world.
-- Author unknown
