Need some email/colo service -- recommedations?

[granty at bellatlantic.net (Grant Young)]

As for the original question...  There's actually two services being
asked for...  

Part 1: The email, offsite storage, and web hosting.  Most of the web
hosting sites do most of it.  I've been using 100 Megs Web Hosting,
cheap and Linux based, but there are hundreds of these guys out there so
check 'em out based on what you need.  I get my domains at GoDaddy.com
and then sign up at 100 Megs.  In couple of days that part works good. 
POP is likely to be cheaper than IMAP mail in the long run since you've
got to store the IMAP files on a server (and replicate it if you want
fault tolerance).  Ugh...  I can understand why some businesses need it
for audit trails and such but I wouldn't start with it.  I like not
having to take care of the basic machines for this and putting some
responsibility on the individual users.

The other part is internet connectivity to your work site(s).  For small
number of folks I'd recommend DSL of some sort if you can get it.  I
just was browsing for a downtown Boston location and Verizon, Speakeasy,
and Covad seemed to be offering stuff for my location.  The main
difference between business and residential appears to be SLAs and the
option for static IPs.  Verizon likes to bundle the services together. 
Which can be a pain if you're a savvy customer since the tech support is
pitched to the naive.

For backup:  In my experience backup is a huge PIA.  You really have to
decide what's important (storage or restoral).  I can't think of
anything that really works archivally (>5 years, which isn't even close
to archival).  In my experience, the vast majority of restores are
recently deleted or changed files that broke something, especially with
small startups.

For the rsync to a hard disk crowd, BackupPC
(http://backuppc.sourceforge.net) is a very clever set of wrapper
scripts for rsync/samba that will get you quick and dirty PC and Linux
backups for the "I accidentally deleted my files" problem.  It's got
some nice web restore features, too.

As for tapes my personal current fave is AIT (because of size
considerations) with DLT a close second.  Somewhat expensive but if
you're going to put it on tape do it right.  Tapes that aren't reliable
aren't worth ****.  The online services are getting very attractive
price wise.  The down side with all incremental backup systems like the
online ones is that they take a long time the first time and they don't
handle large files that change a lot (like database files) very
gracefully.

Grant Young,
Eastmark Computer Support

On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 10:33, Mark J. Dulcey wrote:
> Chris Devers wrote:
> 
> > Tapes are fragile too, but if cared for reasonably well it seems like they
> > can work for decades. Will that be true for hard drives & CDs?
> 
> True for the old-fashioned 9-track tapes. But newer formats are more 
> problematic; just try to find a new drive that can actually read a 10 
> year old tape. Your 10 year old drive won't help, either. For starters, 
> it's probably worn out, and you can't get replacement parts. If it does 
> work, it won't be compatible with any computers you have. It probably 
> requires interfaces that current computers no longer offer, and over on 
> the Windows side of the world, there won't be any drivers for any OS 
> version less than 5 years old.
> 
> (How bleak the picture is depends in part on what part of the market 
> you're looking at. 10 year old low-end tape formats are completely 
> hopeless; they were QIC tape and data cassette, both of which are 
> completely defunct now. As for the big enterprise stuff, you were 
> looking at either 8mm or DDS-1; you might be able to get drives that can 
> read those for a couple more years. But the argument still applies; it 
> just pushes the drop-dead time out a bit. Besides, for a business of the 
> scale we're discussing here, you're probably not going to be looking at 
> tape systems in the $4,000 class.)
> 
> CD-R and DVD-R are actually better bets in that regard, because CDs and 
> DVDs are so popular. It is likely that readers will continue to be 
> available for a long time to come, because of the popularity of the 
> medium for both data and entertainment. Just watch out for weird 
> proprietary backup file formats, as there may be no software available 
> to read them.
> 
> Longevity of the media is a different issue, and perhaps a problem. 
> Certainly cheap CD-Rs are a poor bet for long-term storage. Aging tests 
> suggest that the good ones will last at least 50 years, but the 
> real-world results aren't in yet. The picture is even less clear for 
> DVD-R, since it is so new.
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