I have taken the initiative of approaching one of my webhosts, http://futurequest.net/, and asking if they might be interested in sponsoring us. FutureQuest is one of the best (performance and support-wise) webhosts in the virtual hosting market. They also have dedicated hosting for sites that require it. FQ runs their own data center.
Here is the list of questions that I was asked by FQ. I think it would be useful to answer these as thoroughly as possible as other webhosts will probably ask similar questions.
mose: you are probably the person to answer most of these questions... I've just started with some notes
1) What kind of server specs is the site running on now
PIII 1.6GHz, 1Go DDRAM, 40GO IDE disk, GNU/Linux Debian
2) What is causing you to seek other hosting arrangements
tikiwiki.org is currently running on a personal server that is not
optimized for hosting high volume websites. Server load is often
above 1, and traffic is rising more and more
3) What are the statistics of the site, number of visits, etc
At mid-august we have 15k pages viewed per day.
4) How much bandwidth and disk space is being used, and what is your uplink speed
At mid-august : Disk space 134Mo on disk filesystem, 45Mo for db. Around 5Go bandwidth used per month.
5) What is the growth trend of the site, how fast is it growing
Fast, but unpredicable. Some traffic are split on development servers. But the official website
traffic should grow more and more, as it's a worldwide application.
(check http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-stats.php for more infos)
6) What kind of exposure are we talking about, is it active promotion, or just a couple of banners
FQ: We have tried this in the past with very disappointing results on cost recovery
Ideas? Some kind of out-of-the-box Tiki feature for the webhost? What kinds of reasonable active promotion would webhosts want?
7) How much promotion is done for the project itself
Marc?
Tikiwiki is routinely in the top 5 most active projects list on SourceForge. Tikiwiki held the #1 position for the past week.
8) How resource intensive is the Tikiwiki software itself
?
9) What is the base level of hardware you would require(*)
FQ: BaseLevel MQS system is: AMD Thunderbird 1.4Ghz + 256MB Ram + 3Ware RAID-1
10) Will you require root to the server and will _you_ be in charge of administering the server, or will we have to manage it
root access will be required. The Tikiwiki team has qualified system administrators that are qualified to manage the server. There is no need for the webhost to manage it for us.
11) If #10 is 'yes', have you had any security problems with your present Tikiwiki server operations
No.
12) if #10 is 'yes', how many people will have root access to the server
A few, but at least 5, selected by each others.
13) if #10 is 'yes', what is the experience level of the admin(s) for this server
At least 3 years in productivity context as regular admin.
14) Has the current Tikiwiki server been the target of any major DDoS attacks
No.
15) Has the current Tikiwiki server ever been rooted or cracked
No. It's a server with live people on it. Any anormal activity is detected very fast, it's a geek lair,
not a place where things are to steal.
Please be as thorough and complete as possible...
FQ: In essence, the Tikiwiki project is asking FutureQuest to subsidize: $4,987 via hardware and network infrastructure access... (up to 50GB)