You may wonder what computing services go into producing Webconverger.
The main method has been building images on a Thinkpad X40 and uploading to Dreamhost where the following sites are hosted:
- webconverger.com
- download.webconverger.com
- portal.webconverger.com
Californian hosters Dreamhost actually provide a very good service considering the price point. The bandwidth is practically unlimited.
However uploading to Dreamhost from a British broadband connection has been painful. So in the past, in order to save money, I volunteered to work on a shared server called argo.nipl.net, which is now defunct. On argo I could build images and upload them pretty quickly. However I could not test the images until I downloaded them onto my Thinkpad. Downloading is actually quite painless from a good British broadband ADSL connection.
Webconverger.org, this wiki, requires a machine which I have sudo on. Previously I was running webconverger.org in a vserver on argo. It's recently moved and now hosted on a Xen slicehost virtual machine called "au". It seems to work quite well so far for 38USD a month.
Since I am keen to build "au" to become an automated Webconverger build server, I thought I should perhaps also setup another machine to basically replicate what "au" is doing in Europe. So right now I am waiting to get a server in Finland ready and then I'll start prepping both machines to basically do the same stuff.
I have been investigating vservers or VPSes in other countries. Here are some suggestions:
For testing purposes I plan to upgrade my X40 to an X61. Also I hope to do video testing of each image produced. I'll save that story for another day.