As my regular readers know, my translation business has really been on the rocks lately. This isn’t all bad. Being dead broke serves as a lot of motivation to look around for other things to do.

Way back in 1994 I registered the domain cat.net, when such things cost around US$50 per year. For the next six years, cat.net served as my own personal domain, with a Linux server at home and as many as 8 smaller machines in the house at different times. In 2001, I handed the cat.net domain over to my ex-wife as part of our divorce settlement and started using gogulski.com instead. She later sold the cat.net domain for a rather handsome sum, and the domain has been “parked” with various “coming soon” and parked-domain monetization schemes since then. In 2000, the main host, squeaker.cat.net squeaker.gogulski.com (“Squeaker” is one of Henry’s nicknames), moved into collocation with my ISP employer, carrying all of its email accounts, mailing lists and websites with it. The company collapsed, along with my interest in running my own Linux box, and I started migrating people off before everything at the office got shut down. I haven’t been involved in maintaining my own servers since.

Since June of this year, though, I’ve become very involved in building and supporting web infrastructure for various liberty causes, including operating websites for the Free Agents Network, the Motorhome Diaries, and the Ladies of Liberty Alliance. I’ve also started a blog hosting service, Freedom Blogs, which has now grown to a whopping ten users with no promotion, and am working on a few other new web projects besides.

And I’ve started running into limitations with DreamHost, the web hosting provider where all this stuff lives. I love the reliability and security of having the infrastructure taken care of in a secure data center, but, ARGH I want more control over my hosting environment.

So, I’ve been off at Amazon for a little while putting together a short shopping list for a web hosting cluster.

First, some cheapish web servers:

• 3x HP ProLiant DL320 G5p Quad-Core Xeon X3210/2.13 GHz @ $1060 each
• 12x 2 GB – DIMM DDR2 – 800 MHz / PC2-6400 @ $76 each

This could be okay for a just-starting-out database server:

• 1x HP ProLiant DL380 G5 2 x Quad-Core Xeon X5460 / 3.16 GHz @ $5520
• 8x 8 GB ( 2 x 4 GB ) – FB-DIMM DDR2 – 667 MHz / PC2-5300 @ $291 each
• 8x HP Hard drive – 500 GB – 2.5″ SFF – SAS-2 – 7200 rpm @ $583 each

But, oh, I need two of those. One for the database server and one for the storage server. Maybe they can back each other up.

And then a switch, of course:

• Cisco Catalyst Express 520G-24TC 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch @ $1720

All this for a mere $30,836 plus tax, shipping, insurance, etc. Oh, and then I need some UPS units, some cables, a rack, a KVM switch. I guess I’ll put this on my Christmas list.

Meanwhile, something like just two of those DL320 machines would work. $2576, plus extras… tra la la. Daydreams sure are nice.