Mailinglist archive needs a new home

[Marco Pauck <pauck@xxxxxx>]

Since August 1999 I've hosted the archive of several mailinglists
I'm subscribed to:

	http://www.pauck.de/archive/mailinglist/mailinglist.html

This started as a 'do it just for myself' project but has grown
considerably since then.  The content contains several years
of knowledgeable discussions (well, and also some noise and flame
wars ;-) and there is a powerful search engine to dig into it
and find the 'info nuggets'.

Unfortunately, I have to move my whole site now to another ISP
as I'm starting a new employment in May (everything was hosted
by my former employer). Due to its size I can't take the archives
with me.

I see basically three possible solutions to this:

1. Simply drop everything and say good-bye
2. Move the archives to http://www.mail-archive.com/
3. Someone volunteers to provide a new home

I would regret to see the first 'solution' happen as my impression
is that the archives provided a benefit to the related communities.

The second one should be quite workable, and although there are
some limitations of this approach (e.g. regarding maintainability
and privacy) the service could continue with similar features as
the software employed is basically the same.

The third approach requires, of course, the most expenditure
but is also the most flexible. This is opportunity to volunteer!
But think over it before reacting euphorically - although
everything is working quite stable now, providing such a service
is always more work than expected!

To give a rough idea what kind of system resources are required,
here are some current figures (the overall tendency is increasing):
- Visits          :  40,000 /month
- Page views      : 370,000 /month
- Transfer        :   4,000 MB/month
- Message storage :     345 MB
- Index storage   :     475 MB (temporary about 1 GB)

I hope that this service was worthwhile for you.

	Marco

PS: My domain "pauck.de" will probably show some significant
    failures during the next weeks while I move to the new ISP.
--
Marco Pauck -- marco@xxxxxxxx -- http://www.pauck.de/marco/
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple,
neat, and wrong.  -- H. L. Mencken