[iRail] 1 very long week - New hosting

[Pieter Colpaert]

Hi list,

It has not been left unnoticed: last week we have had a lot of server 
trouble.

Nevertheless, this is not an e-mail for telling you how sorry we are. We 
have had free hosting by the guys of rootspirit (which includes Yeri and 
Dries Harnie) for one year. Admiringly, they have never asked anything 
in return and we are very grateful for that. For one year our 
organisation has been able to grow to what we are today. Sadly, the 
servers, did not grow along. The need for new facilities to better 
accommodate the iRail npo has now become more than obvious.

So much for last week. This week we are moving forward. At this moment 
we are running on rootspirit's back-up servers. This means we need to 
find scalable hosting asap. As a board-member I understand that I cannot 
just take this decision impulsively. Therefore I have started putting 
out some tweets on who to talk to in Belgium. There are 4 interesting 
parties:
1. openminds: good service, scalable hosting
2. priorweb: they have some really interesting packages for our budget
3. combell: very professional cloud hosting. We are already working 
together with Combell for apps for Ghent and apps for Meuven. Might give 
us a discount (to be discussed)
4. iLibris: a special company who are very interested in helping iRail 
out. Google them for more information

I don't know all the details yet. This week I will have a meeting with 
openminds and iLibris. I hope to have some answers by email at the end 
of the week from Combell. As this needs to be done quickly I hope that 
we can do this quickly. I will keep you informed about the final decision.

We don't want to accept sponsoring. We cannot put advertisements in an 
API, and putting advertising in a mobile client is a preposterous idea. 
We have a little left-overs from the Summer Of Code we organised 
(http://summerofcode.be). If 2 more "supporting" members join the NPO we 
have a budget of €60/month. This is very feasible. If anyone of you 
would like to donate something in order to get even better hosting, 
please feel free: 363-083717306 (spread the word ;)).

Kind regards,

Pieter

P.S. A special thanks to Dries Harnie for feeling with us this week and 
fixing a lot of things himself. Thanks to Tim Esselens for helping to 
get BeLaws back up and running. Thanks to Christophe Versieux for the 
mental support :)

-- 
iRail vzw/asbl
+32(0)486/747122