Beyond the theory...

So, after much mulling and discussion, we hatched a plan. We needed a host.

Topic... do we buy a server and host ourselves, or go with an online monthly/annual service fee? We looked fairly carefully online for a reliable, reputable domain host at a reasonable cost.

The free or low cost hosts either had a poor review or ridiculous restrictions - bandwidth choked to a bare minimum, storage so low you'd be losing data every 6 months. We really expect to get a lot of traffic and members at anopenmind.ca, so these limitations were tough for us to justify, even at free or very low monthly cost. So, what about the services that don't choke the life out of you or charge ridiculous over-storage/excess bandwidth fees?

Well, most of them were unaffordable. We didn't want to ask for donations on the site - I'm not a fan of sites that do that - and advertising is not a reliable source of income. So, most of the cost would be coming out of pocket.

OK, option 2 - buy a server. This is what we did, which led to an even more interesting exercise... we had to learn about the different types of server, server software compatibility, RAID options, and so on and so on... Stay tuned.

CUL8R