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

Why jump on one offer?

[anthony_dipierro]

Why not accept all the offers?

load balancing

[a.koepke]

What I would do is accept them all and setup each server as a subdomain. (www1, www2, www3 etc)

Where the main domain resides is an account that is in your control and redirects the request to one of the other servers.

This way if one goes down you can simply remove it from the list of mirror servers. It also maintains you in control of the setup instead of giving one person 100% control of the site by putting it on their server.

Re:load balancing

[cynicalmoose]

or use Google's technique of expiring the DNS lease on its ip every 5 minutes (so the DNS servers go back and get another ip from Google), which then reassigns a different oene

Free is sometimes expensive

[eXtro]

Make sure that you can trust the person who's offering the bandwidth. Beyond that it'd be even better if you have somebody who lives near by who can physically pull the plug if need be or rescue any hardware. I took up a free hosting offer. My equipment and code was stolen (by the Chris Kuivenhoven mentioned in my .sig)

Will they own your site?

[AvitarX]

and all content ever created for it (even the content you don't own yourself).

Linux Gazette forgot to ask those questions ansd it did not work out to well for them