colocation costs: Re: Remailers and ecash (fwd)

[Bill Stewart]

>>I'm wondering about your co-location machine, from your comments above it
>>must be sitting in a field since you don't pay rent (or was that your way of
>>saying somebody else pays the rent for you?). Is this so? Since so many of
>>your utilities and physical plant are donated I have to question the
>>accuracy and utility of your figures as well as the applicability of those
>>figures to a true commercial enterprise.

Depending on the security, performance, and price you're looking for, 
you can run your own machine on your own premises, 
run your own machine in somebody else's colocation facility (either
as a favor, like anon.efga.org may be, or using a commercial ISP),
have somebody else run a dedicated machine for you (mostly ISPs),
buy a shell account on an ISP or other service provider's machine,
use a free shell account from somewhere, or use an IP-only connection.

Sure, free colocation space is nice, but there _are_ plenty of ISPs
running commercially reliable colocation services that get you UPSed
electricity,
professionally maintained routers, and some share of a T1 or T3 to the world,
for far less than the rent you'd pay for doing the whole job yourself,
since they have economies of scale by handling multiple colocation
customers and
also handling their own servers.   

Shell accounts are still typically $20-30/month, though obviously it's a
lot less 
secure since somebody else has root on the machine your remailer's secret
key lives on,
but that does include professionally maintained hardware, mail systems, and
backups.

				Thanks!
					Bill
Bill Stewart, stewarts at ix.netcom.com
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