I would love to move all my servers into the cloud.  The biggest benefit is I don't have to maintain the hardware.  I can pay as I go, and only pay for what I need.  I have to create servers that are more powerful than what I need at the moment so that they can handle future growth.  That money could have been saved using the cloud, but...

 

The biggest drawback with the cloud is price.  I looked at Amazon's ECS, Microsoft's Azure, and Google's Compute Engine every so often, hoping that their pricing models have changed.  Their virtual machine options do not fit my usage.  It seems that the amount of memory for a given machine is proportional to the disk size.  I want a machine with lots of memory and a small disk as my database server.  The file server has the opposite requirement: large disks and (relative) little memory.  RA has about 1 TB worth of compressed data, all of which must be persistent.  Persistent storage is very expensive.

 

In the end, owning the hardware and paying for space and bandwidth in a data center is still more cost effective than all other options I've explored.  It's much more work for me should something goes wrong, but it is what I can afford with the ad revenue and your financial support.

#1, I would hope this episode encourages all to evaluate when it was they last donated and consider they do so again.  You clearly have your customers' best interests in mind.  That is worth a lot.

#2, I think it is worth looking at what dropped through the cracks, in the context of the data lost.  It appears (unless I am incorrect) that the data lost was not the basic log data, but more along the lines of uploaded GPS data etc....the finer details.  In my basic manually entered log usage, I saw NOTHING lost.  It is good that you view no data loss as acceptable.  It is good if people realize the realities of backup procedures and value that the core of their log was not apparently at risk.  That if they value that extra level of security, a little more donation may be in order.

You do a fantastic job.

#1 to Spaniel. Nicely said. .

I do not understand much of whst Eric is talking about but I donate! Thanks Eric.