I talked to a friend in hosting business in the bay area. He told me the cost for 1/4 rack and 1Mbps committed bandwidth was about $500 per month. I asked if there was a price for a 1U unit since 1/4 is more than 15U. He said 1/4 rack was the smallest he knew. FastEther connection to backbone.

Reliablity of home DSL is hard to gurantee. My adsl had outage every other day for some 2 week period. Some dsl service may be better but still I doubt it is up to critical missions.

I dont know much home T1 but I can say they are very rare very expensive. The market is small. Who needs 1.5Mbps to home?

The colo I was talking about is a one megabit line (1024Kb/s) while a T1 is 1536Kb/s... It is right down the street from me, so if need be I could pop in and restart it... That said, my particular solution has LOM, which allows remote reboots and crap like that...

A home DSL line is fine but not 100% reliable... My line loses a few hours a month due to whatever... The advantage is you can IM/email/call me and I can hobble over to the server and kick it...

I seriously doubt that you'd need anything beyond a 768Kb/s SDSL line for this... There are a few pages that are super big, but those could be trimmed or compressed to save bandwidth...

COLO/Dedicated is going to be a must for such a server. xDSL/Cable can be a good net connection, but if you want the most stable you will most likely to need a colo.

With colo I personally think it is best to go with a Tier 1 provider for such purpose. It will cost more but if you dont use all that much data it doesnt cost THAT much more. Some cheaper providers connection can be very lousy and unstable. That was why I was asking earlier how much bandwidth the server was working, in terms of GB/month.

[quote="Xyzzy"]The colo I was talking about is a one megabit line (1024Kb/s) while a T1 is 1536Kb/s... It is right down the street from me, so if need be I could pop in and restart it... That said, my particular solution has LOM, which allows remote reboots and crap like that...

A home DSL line is fine but not 100% reliable... My line loses a few hours a month due to whatever... The advantage is you can IM/email/call me and I can hobble over to the server and kick it...
[/quote]

... We are waiting here so long for something better than ISDN... Maybe when you'll reach Mars we'll get a cable line!...It is just sour grapes... :(

You need to move Guido :D and we definately must have a dedicated T1 or its ilk running the server. Frequent outages in a DC computing project will affect way too many people as there is always SOMEBODY trying to connect. If there's a serious move to relocate the server, do a professional job and create something that can expand, rather than someone's pet project. We already have an Uber version of that. :)

[quote="Deamiter"]You need to move Guido :D[/quote]

Think you're rigth... :(
To tell the truth, there are some cables here as well, but just in the biggest cities like Milan or Rome: let's hope that sooner or later they reach even the country... Otherwise...
Regards

[quote]there are some cables here as well, but just in the biggest cities like Milan or Rome[/quote]

Guido what we really need is professionality of our Carriers... Our ADSL lines work like yours... 24/36 hours of outages a week. Like having none. :(

Too bad we can't help to the upgrade from here...

Luigi

[quote="ET_"][quote]there are some cables here as well, but just in the biggest cities like Milan or Rome[/quote]

Guido what we really need is professionality of our Carriers... Our ADSL lines work like yours... 24/36 hours of outages a week. Like having none. :(

Too bad we can't help to the upgrade from here...

Luigi[/quote]

Nice to know it enough!
I've just ask Telecom for an ADSL line, 'cause it should be available soon here between the nothern mountains... I'll try to ask for some discount for each hour of outage... ;)
Ciao Luigi! Saluti a Roma! Casomai passassi dalle parti del lago di Garda, fammi un fischio chè ti offro un caffè...
(eng: Hi Luigi! If you have to come around here close to the Garda Lake, let me know: it will'be nice to have a cup of coffee together...)

Is there any web server stats available for the PrimeNet server ? That would tell us the current traffic level and minimum requirements. Future levels can then be extrapolated.

Another issue is the server itself. You will have to evaluate the DB load, the WEB load and the scheduled task loads. I guess this is the area where the biggest improvement could be made.

I personally guess this would be ideal for a university to host. They are usually very qualified technically, most of the have access to high speed networks and this is after all a research project worthy of their attention.

In UK a dedicated 2M line (leased line or E1) is about 1200GBP per month. That type of connection is not cheap. BTW I run one of these from home :D . I could technically run such a server, but at the moment I do not have any dedicated server available.

Alf

Scott wrote to me a year ago (I'll ask Brad if he happens to know the current GB/month bandwidth needs):


The principle CPU requirement is to drive the database. The web server runs on the same box for little overhead, but the SQL reports often eat almost 100% CPU for minutes. RAM makes a big performance difference since SQL Server caches pretty much the entire set of tables and only the write-thrus do I/O (thus reports are mostly CPU/bus bound)


Transactions average 2 to 3/sec for nominal (around the clock average)client load, with spikes of up to several dozen per second. Heavy loads are sometimes sustained for at most an hour or so due to default Prime95 retry timing if the server/DNS/network has been offline for more than an hour. If the server has been offline for several hours or more, it's important to have the capacity to handle the initial onslaught of overdue client connections, or you will never get the server caught up and back into its normal rhythm. Having a decent network pipe applies here, too. A DSL line would do most of the time, but it's important to have a T1+ or cablemodem speed line for the inevitable occasional heavy traffic load.

I talked to Brad. It looks like mersenne.org uses 58MB bandwidth per day - most of it outbound. That's 1.7GB per month. I'd estimate that a revamped server with neat charts and more stats and backups over the Internet would at least double that bandwidth requirement.