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October 2017

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[Inkscape] Request for hosting sponsorship for the Inkscape Project
by Bryce Harrington 12 Oct '17

12 Oct '17

Inkscape is seeking to improve its online service hosting. To this end we're soliciting proposals for donation/sponsorship of hosting services for the project. The Inkscape Project is a non-profit, volunteer-driven organization that develops and maintains the popular Inkscape vector drawing software, provided freely to millions of artists, designers, and other drawers of lines. Our website is at http://www.inkscape.org If you would be interested in sponsoring us through a donation of hosting service, we would be happy to add you to our sponsors page, with a mention & link on our main website's footer. Proposals can be sent to me as contact point. These will be presented to Inkscape's board, who will make the final determination in about a month's time. == Background == We currently have various services hosted at a number of different locations with widely varying administrative capacities. We would like to centralize the administration of these services, such as consolidating them onto one platform. We also want room and flexibility to easily install additional services as we grow. Services high on our priority list to migrate soon include mailing lists, Mattermost, and wiki. Bug tracking, web forum and gitlab are potential secondary priorities. Our Django-based main website may also be worth consolidating at some point in the future. For redundancy, we'd like to engage two distinct hosts, with one as a primary and the other backup/space, preferrably in geographically distinct areas (e.g. Europe and Canada). == Requirements == We think that a suitable machine would look something like this: Minimum Desired Required Ideal CPU: dual core quad core RAM: 4 gb 256 gb Storage: 500GB >1 TB (HW RAID-1) HDD SDD Bandwidth: 1 TB/mo 2 TB/mo OS: Any linux Ubuntu 16.04 We like the straightforwardness of physical (metal) hardware, but could consider virtual options if we can get similar levels of flexibility and expandability. * UPS power backup * 24h support at the datacenter - For hardware (metal) options, a technician would need to be available for handling hardware issues, to do OS installation/reinstallation, hook up KVM/IP if available, and to investigate faults that can't be diagnosed remotely. * Server would be under the administrative and technical management of the Inkscape admin team (about 6-8 people). We would have root access to the machine for doing system updates and to install/configure software and services. * We expect to be managing/maintaining our software ourselves. Items we anticipate migrating to this include (in rough order of priority): + Mailman3 + Mattermost + Wiki (mediawiki currently) + Forum (e.g. hosting for inkscapeforum.com) + Bug tracker (TBD) + Gitlab + Other project management tools + Website / Django * Inkscape does not handle anything particularly controversial. No copyright infringing materials, nothing political, nothing intentionally offensive. Our windows binary has been false-positived by virus software in the past, but we clear this up ourselves. * Currently our website hosting is sponsored and managed by OSUOSL. It's a root access virtual machine running postgresql, memcached, nginx and the django site itself. Memory usage is 450MiB per web host thread, currently 2 threads, plus 500MB for postgresql and 500MB for memcache. CDN is hosted by Fastly, currently serving 32TB per month for Inkscape (1:1.5 ratio US:EU, so more EU hits overall). There's enough dynamic content that we still see a decent load (1/2 TB/mo) on the server, notably around major releases (once every year or two); we are continuously tweaking optimizations.

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