@scottalanmiller You can checkout http://rgvrrm.org. They run their own railroad. The museum supports railroad history preservation and education. If you ever wanted to be an engineer this is the place for you.

The museum only gives rides a few times per year but volunteers are there nearly every Saturday working. Drop me a line if you'd like a tour. I'm the Volunteer Coordinator there.

If you live long enough all backups will fail.

In my own personal experience I had a few things on QIC format tape cartridges. I had 5 drives. It turns out that after a decade the chemicals on the capstan of the drive breaks down and the drive bec omes useless. I.e., all QIC drives fail the same way in the same timeframe.

I had some stuff on 8mm tapes. My drive went bad after many year of little use. Not worth buying a new one.

My old CD backups are still readable after 8 years. My rule of thumb is that here is a .1% chance of damaging a CD every time it is handled. I don't have experience with the 25GB media. It looks like the CD/DVD format has at least another decade to run. Go for it!

Ciao,
//Z\

@dafyre After login I am getting a response :" DATABASE HAS LEFT THE BUILDING: CONNECTION_ERROR" from panel.cloudatcost.com

Thanks for the background! It confirms what I suspected.

I am not ready to call them crooks. I sincerely hope they succeed. The one-time fee works better for me than maintaining an aged PC in a closet at my university. I'm willing to suffer some downtime, crashes, and even awful disk I/O that feels like floppy.

I am guessing they lost some of their hardware. My VM crashed on Friday(11/25). I tried to initialize a new VM. Pending for over 24 hours. They kindly cancelled it but a second try at another init has been pending for nearly a day.

I am starting a cloud search... Does anyone maintain a list of cloud providers? As a non-profit I can get a pretty good deal at Amazon. $175 gets me $2k of AWS. That is overkill for what I need now.

@CloudAtCost update:

After a couple of weeks I got a working VM. I got to watch it install on the web-based console. it was really slow! When I tried to ssh in i was wondering why no ssh daemon forked. Turns out they assigned me an IP that belonged to someone else! Arghhh! Could be another week before an install gets run....

Thanks for cloud provider list! I will stop at Azure since Microsoft offered us a $5k grant. MS even called me to tell me about their program! God bless those guys!

Azure is way more complex than I need. But after using it a bit I can appreciate why. For example I see the value of a firewall off of the VM.

@scottalanmiller You can checkout http://rgvrrm.org. They run their own railroad. The museum supports railroad history preservation and education. If you ever wanted to be an engineer this is the place for you.

The museum only gives rides a few times per year but volunteers are there nearly every Saturday working. Drop me a line if you'd like a tour. I'm the Volunteer Coordinator there.

@Dashrender I am an unix weenie myself. My first project is a mailhost and mailman list server. Next would be to host our web pages http://rgvrrm.org. It is Wordpress (PHP) based so I'd like that to be a separate VM. It makes it easier to clean up when it gets broken into.

Ultimate goal is to facilitate collaboration among our otherwise computer naive volunteers. They know railroads. They should not need to be computer geeks. I'm estimating ~100 volunteers.

As you can tell I am thinking discrete hosts. What should I be thinking? It has been a decade since I did sysadmin work. I don't consider myself to be particularly cloud oriented.

@CloudAtCost update:

After a couple of weeks I got a working VM. I got to watch it install on the web-based console. it was really slow! When I tried to ssh in i was wondering why no ssh daemon forked. Turns out they assigned me an IP that belonged to someone else! Arghhh! Could be another week before an install gets run....

Thanks for cloud provider list! I will stop at Azure since Microsoft offered us a $5k grant. MS even called me to tell me about their program! God bless those guys!

Azure is way more complex than I need. But after using it a bit I can appreciate why. For example I see the value of a firewall off of the VM.

If you live long enough all backups will fail.

In my own personal experience I had a few things on QIC format tape cartridges. I had 5 drives. It turns out that after a decade the chemicals on the capstan of the drive breaks down and the drive bec omes useless. I.e., all QIC drives fail the same way in the same timeframe.

I had some stuff on 8mm tapes. My drive went bad after many year of little use. Not worth buying a new one.

My old CD backups are still readable after 8 years. My rule of thumb is that here is a .1% chance of damaging a CD every time it is handled. I don't have experience with the 25GB media. It looks like the CD/DVD format has at least another decade to run. Go for it!

Ciao,
//Z\

Thanks for the background! It confirms what I suspected.

I am not ready to call them crooks. I sincerely hope they succeed. The one-time fee works better for me than maintaining an aged PC in a closet at my university. I'm willing to suffer some downtime, crashes, and even awful disk I/O that feels like floppy.

I am guessing they lost some of their hardware. My VM crashed on Friday(11/25). I tried to initialize a new VM. Pending for over 24 hours. They kindly cancelled it but a second try at another init has been pending for nearly a day.

I am starting a cloud search... Does anyone maintain a list of cloud providers? As a non-profit I can get a pretty good deal at Amazon. $175 gets me $2k of AWS. That is overkill for what I need now.

@dafyre After login I am getting a response :" DATABASE HAS LEFT THE BUILDING: CONNECTION_ERROR" from panel.cloudatcost.com

I used CloudatCost for a couple of years and wondered how they did it so cheap. Looks like they finally died this weekend. Panel.cloudatcost.com has completely failed this morning.