On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 5:03 AM ac via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote:
> to admin a vps or two with apache/nginx and mailman with a few thousand?
> subscribers is, imnsho, not a major thing and in terms of vps costs is
> maybe like 10 bucks a month (for two vps) if even two is really needed
>
The issue is not the server or its cost, but the care and feeding of web
services:
- Email (multiple lists)
- Aliases
- Forms and surveys (*)
- Website
- Shareable calendar (*)
The ones marked with (*) We would LIKE to do but don't yet have the tools
and/or time and/or smarts to do.
I have been on the mailing list for ten? years now and I do not remember
> any month where gtalug had any volume that exceeds what a five bucks per
> month vps can carry and a properly configured mailman (which is very
> mature and can be battle hardened)
We've had some very smart people running mailman and it still doesn't work
to anyone's satisfaction. Or maybe it's our SMTP server, I don't know which
one it is.
The existing people on the Board have just become exhausted and the
volunteers with the tech skills and keys to everything aren't always
reachable. As volunteers I don't expect immediate tech support, but it just
makes the process of constant firefighting more than we are prepared to
bear.
cannot take more than an hour or two per month to admin.
I can only tell you that this is nowhere near the effort required, which is
an insane amount of effort required for a small group like ours.
> > Anything we host ourselves bears both admin resources and financial
> > hosting cost. Right now we're using mailman and frankly, I see the
> > bounce messages and it's almost impossible to keep track of.
> > (Hint: I tried mailing this Sunday night but that bounced). I really
> > don't like mailman anymore. There are better ways to filter spam.
> >
> if your own email to mailman is bouncing, this is probably not what you
> think it is :)
>
It probably isn't. But I'm tired of running after other people to diagnose.
> That said, I'm in no position to guarantee anything.
> >
> and this sentence is the crux of it. personally I do not trust google.
>
I can't guarantee that I'll be alive tomorrow, either.
There is no reason to believe that Google for Nonprofits is going away any
time this decade, and if there is I'd love to hear it. If they tried it,
the outcry from the charitable world would be deafening.
There are many reasons and ways to mistrust Google; this isn't one of them.
it would be far easier to pay 10 bucks and get three sysadmins to each donate
> an hour a month (and their scripts :) )
>
That's the whole point of this conversation. We're already paying a nominal
hosting fee and have volunteer sysadmins and things are still constantly
borked.
IT IS NOT EASIER, let alone FAR easier, our real-world experience to date
bears that out.
so, if you decide to continue having an emailing list and self hosted services
> I would gladly donate some of my time (at least four hours a month [...]
If all we had to do is threaten to move services to Google in order to get
more people to volunteer, we could have done that ages ago. We're well past
that. Your four hours a month are still very much valued, but we need that
energy for more things than just keeping things running -- especially when
we have an offer, at no cost, of commercial-grade online services.
providing that there is at least one (or two) other high/senior skill
> dev/sys/ops also?
>
See? Every volunteer effort comes with strings and limitations. So does
mine. So does that for everyone else on the Board.
A group this small should not need to be spending so much of its
behind-the-scenes energy just herding cats. There's too much else to do
that isn't being done just so we can keep the virtual lights on.
- Evan
