[m-dev.] Hosting for Mercury downloads

[Paul Bone]

Julien and I have been coordinating to maintain the Mercury downloads, which
is currently hosted on google cloud services.  It costs a few dollars per
month, depending on usage.  (I have not yet made up a budget for the Mercury
hosting expenses as I orginally inteded to do.)

Alternatively we could move the downloads onto the web server, which is
probably easier to administer.  It may be faster in some situations but
definitly slower when under high load.  The webserver is a fixed 6-monthly
cost of about $45USD, I also use it for other projects and personal e-mail.
However the server also has a fixed capacity, and many many builds,
sspecially ROTDs may fill it up.

So my questions are, do we need to keep months/years of ROTDs?  Do we need
to keep them online or is archiving them in our homes/offices good enough?
As it is there is very little pre-2012 online.  If anyone requests something
pre-2012 I may have it on a hard disk in my wardrobe and can retrive it.


For reference the relevant hosting choices are:

    Paul's server, shared with other things:
        $45/6 months,
        Bandwidth: there is a limit, I don't remember how it works.
        6GB capacity, less than 1.5G free.
        See http://prgmr.com
        Easy to maintain, easy for Julian and I to work together.

    Google cloud storage:
        Storage: $0.026/GB
        Bandwidth downloads: $0.12-$0.23/GB (destination dependant)
        Bandwidth uploads: free
        Unlimited capacity.
        See https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing
        Okay to maintain, more difficult to work together.

    We could rent a new server and move all the Mercury things there, so
    that it's not shared with Paul's other things:
        Different capacities/sizes available, see http://prgmr.com
        Note that we need some capacity for the storage of the mailing list
        archives, which are currently 1.6GB.
        This also allows me to share the responsability with someone else,
        in case something happened to me or I was otherwise busy.  It also
        seperates Mercury from other things, which may be better for
        security of both Mercury and eg my personal e-mail.

We currently have 13GB of archives available online.


-- 
Paul Bone