Considerations When Accepting Bandwidth Donations?

dnotj asks: "I'm involved in a project that is growing fast and is going to soon outgrow it's current hosting location. I've had a couple of offers for donating bandwidth (and servers in one case). Basically free colocation or dedicated servers. Since this isn't a revenue generating project, it's going to be necessary to migrate this project and it's related website to a location with adequate bandwidth. What kinds of questions should I be asking these generous organizations that make these offers? I just want to make sure I cover all my bases before jumping on one of these offers."

Comments

The basic legalities...

[gabraham]

First things first: Ask them what, if any, conditions there are to their "gifts".

If they are providing the hosting or bandwidth, be sure to read the small print! Make sure that you aren't signing away any rights that you might care about. I'm not just talking about copyrights and trademarks, I mean things like the right to publish your work elsewhere, change hosting services or servers at any time, how and when access is provided to the server, if and when backups are done (started/completed), what you can expect in case of an unacceptably long downtime, etc.

Strings?

[Zapper]

Are there any conditions that come with the offer?
For instance, having to run advertisements and other such stuff.

Re:Free is sometimes expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't have a backup for your code? Moron.

Look out for number one!

[Bald Wookie]

Get a ton of stock options and a time machine to 1999.

Realistically, make sure you have rights to access your data if they ever go under or quit hosting your project. Waking up to 404's and no backups is not much fun. See if they'll give you at least one month notice if they ever decide to quit. Then you'll have a much better time of migrating somewhere else. Other than that, it's a gift, don't expect to be able to make too many demands. Make your requests for "the good of the project" which should be your primary concern here anyway.

Exchange

[rf0]

Whilst its nice that some people offer free hosting (and we do for a couple of projects) ask what they are getting in return. Some companies are happy with a text link saying "hosted by ...". However watch out for popups.

Then again hopefully most hosts can be trusted

Rus

Stuff to think about

[ajs318]

If you are just getting bandwidth, and they want to foist banner ads on you, make sure that the advertisements will come from a different IP address than your server, so your customers can block them. They want to see your editorial content, not adverts.

If you're getting hosting, make sure you get a full-blown service. A certain British cable company {clue: not Telewest} promised me 10MB, five IP addresses and my own cgi-bin when I signed up for their broadband service. Turned out they meant five e-mail addresses {not even proper virtual hosting}, one dynamically-assigned IP address that does not give me the hostname I ask for {seems to last >6 months at a time though}, and no cgi-bin - not even a shared one. They did up the offer to 50MB of space, but with neither Perl nor PHP it was slightly less useful than a chocolate fireguard {at least you can eat a chocolate fireguard}. Fortunately, their IP addresses do last awhile, so I was able to get someone to point an A record to my home server for me.

A full-featured site should include at least two scripting languages out of Perl, PHP and Python; a database {MySQL for speed or PostgreSQL for real database features}; and an AllowOverride setting liberal enough to let you specify most things in your own .htaccess file. You should have access to error.log and it's also nice if the user "nobody" {or whatever user name CGI scripts run as} has access to it -the then you can use a script for an errordoc 500, like this:

#!/bin/sh
echo -en "Content-type: text/plain\n\n"
echo -en "Your script went tits-up. Herewith its last words, as they drift along the wind to sweet oblivion:\n\n"
tail -n50 /var/log/httpd/error.log

A bash prompt is nice but not essential {you can often use the #!/bin/sh trick to get around its absence}.

Basically, you want everything except root access. {There are only three ways to get root access on an ISP's machine: work for an ISP, be related to someone who works for an ISP, or save the life of someone who works for an ISP}.

Of course, if you're getting a full server to yourself, then you do want root access; ideally, you should actually install the OS yourself, so you know it is not trojanned. You should also have the ability to make a phone call to a human being and have the machine reset {it must be a human being, because fsck sometimes needs the root password if it wants to do anything hairy}.