400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup. Donations like this are rare and it may be all they get for a decade.
Personally I would feel better about round robin across multiple maintainer-home-hosted machines.
Personally I would feel better about round robin across multiple maintainer-home-hosted machines.
I don’t know where you’re pricing coloration, but I could host a single server indefinitely from the interest alone on $400K at the (very nice) data centers I’ve used.
Collocation is not that expensive. I’m not understanding how you think $400K would disappear “fast” unless you think it’s thousands of dollars per month?
Regardless, the ongoing interest on $400K alone would be enough to pay colo fees.
I don't know what kind of rates are available to non-profits, but with 400k in hand you can find nicer rates than 3.3 (as of today, at least).
that covers quite a few colo possibilities.
Another thing overlooked in this debate: Data center costs normally increase at the rate of inflation. This is not included in most estimates. That said, I still agree with the broad sentiment here: 400K USD is plenty of money to run a colo server for 10+ years from the risk-free interest rate.
Modern computers are super efficient. A 9755 has 128 cores and you can get it for cheap. If you've been doing this for a while you'd have gotten the RAM for cheap too.
If I, a normie, can have terabytes of RAM and hundreds of cores in a colo, I'm pretty sure they can unless they have some specific requests.
And dude, I'm in the Bay Area. Think about that. I'm in one of the highest cost localities and I can do this. I bet there are Colorado or Washington DCs that are even cheaper.
In any event if I was the volunteer sysadmin that had to babysit the box, I would rather have it at my home with business fiber where I am on premises most of the time because getting in and out of a colo is always a whole thing if their security is worth a damn.
Even given a frugal and accessible setup like that I can imagine 400k lasting 5 years tops especially if paying for the volunteers business fiber and much more especially given I expect some of it is to provide a sustainable compensation to key team members as well. Every cent will count.
At that rate, that would buy you nearly 1000 years of hosting.
I really don’t know where the commenter above was getting the idea that $400K wouldn’t last very long
The jury's still out on whether or not this is a good thing.
So glad it grew into what it is now!
I Googled for that brand and got a few hits:
- https://inflect.com/building/1325-tracy-avenue-kansas-city/joes-datacenter/datacenter/joes-datacenter
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/joesdatacenter/
- https://www.facebook.com/joesdatacenter/
Another under appreciated point about that data center: It has excellent geographical location to cover North America.
Of course you have to buy the switches and servers…