People have become very used to using the internet, and everything always being free. Well - it ain't. You pay for internet access, and the sites you visit are funded, somehow - often through advertising, sponsorship, donations, or corporate or individual loss or offset. The bbc.co.uk site is payed for by the licence fee. The newspapers often fund their sites through the price of the newspaper. Small sites are relatively easy for individuals to fund or maintain, but once they take off or become popular, like the indymedia project - the costs begin to mount.

This might be 'news' to a lot of people - but its true. If 5-10 people come to your site each hour, its cheap - yep - you can support that for less than £30 / year. If you get 100 people per hour - its likely to cost £hundreds, and that keeps going up. If you are serving a lot of information to 1000's of people an hours, it will cost £1000's per year. I don't know what indymedia.org's traffic is like, but I do think if indymedia.org.uk is set up correctly - then the US side can worry about their .org server. People based in the EU should look after their own arses. On the other hand, the new EU servers will end up being victims of their own success as take-up expands.

So - keep a few quid aside and be prepared, if indymedia.org.uk needs your help - its not Psyops - its just the fruit of your committed success working together!

Happy New Year,

Pesqy

hi, not sure about indymedia.org but org.uk is not using compression (mod_gzip) which i'd really recommend as it will dramatically reduce your bandwidth requirements - cant recommend it enough , perhaps the .org people should make sure that they're using this module.

happy new year folks.

isn't this a bit of a panic mongering here? the main indymedia page is _still_there_ , meaning the global features team still updates the middle column, and the right column is fed by the middle features of the worldwide local indymedia's (admittedly we haven't managed to get the uk middle column into there as the uk rss [=syndication] feed is still not updating).

fact is the global site has moved server and codebase, and a lot of work has gone into that, and all respect to those who done it. see the announcement of the move at  http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-tech/2003-December/012280.html

the only thing that is not functional with the global site as usual at the moment is the upload function - and that has more to do with the migration itself. if you're really interested for more details then check  http://lists.indymedia.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/www-migration

yes there is a 'server crisis' but that is mainly to do with bandwidth - which in the end is exactly the costly thing why the global site (and a lot of other local ones) needed to move in the first place. but as things are at the moment the global site is being be mirrored with pretty limitless bandwidth demand in case their provider situation should go bad.

trust the network - this is not going to die that easy!

Gug: we have looked at using mod_gzip on indy.org.uk but the server does not have spare cpu cycles to do the compression.