stay a while and dwell in the fediverse or are you afraid you might enjoy it?

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Do not expect you can offer this service for a competive price against cloud prices. Caring for a company IT system is a big challenge and requires more work the more users there are.

    For a company this size: make a clear contract. Consider how much time you need for setup/installation, monthly hours for maintenance, monitoring and at least daily(!) backups. Let them choose if they want it with a failover and charge for the required hours and material. Also put in the contract when they can expect support from you, including a clause for a holiday substitute admin (if needed). Then put a pricetag on support hours for holding people’s hands when they “can’t find that file they uploaded a week ago and it is surely a server issue” and put a pricetag on engineering hours for any modifications they might want, like installing any plugins they deem useful for themselves. Hardware prices, traffic, rack space and power should be included as well. Have a good plan for updates, choose your distro wisely, do not rely on autoupdates.

    Play all this through in your head, add up the hours, choose a fair rate and then you have your pricetag.

    Cloud will always be cheaper, because they have their infrastructure already deployed. Building from the ground up is more expensive, but I think it is worth it. Will they?



  • My vote is Archlinux. Debian is sometimes a little too “optimisitic” when backporting security fixes and upgrading from oldstable to stable always comes with manual intervention.

    Release-based distros tend to be deployed and left to fend on their own for years - when it is finally time to upgrade it is often a large manual migration process depending on the deployed software. A rolling release does not have those issues, you just keep upgrading continuously.

    Archlinux performs excellent as a lightweight server distro. Kernel updates do not affect VM hardware the same they do your laptop, so no issues with that. Same for drivers. It just, works.

    Bonus: it is extremely easy to build and maintain your own packages, so administration of many instances with customized software is very convenient.