[Mailman-Users] Can I pay for Technical support? re: MailMan?

[Nathan A. McQuillen]

Re. Paying for tech support: good idea, IMHO. If most of the money in the
industry went to pay individuals for their skills working with open source
software, rather than to pay monster corporations for the licensing rights
to proprietary code, I think we'd live in a far better world.

<rant>

My advice is, though, keep it personal and local: find a local CS/ECE
student (or grad) with good 'nix skills and pay her well, give her a good
reference and a great title, in exchange for doing your Mailman support.
It's a tough job market right now, and personal client/consultant
relationships are critical. Doing so, you'd also give someone else a hand up
and a chance to learn something dull and practical while still in school. It
sounds like you don't need an all-round consultant, you need someone willing
to work closely with your needs, to be flexible and responsive, and to show
you how to do what they do. In my experience, the best way to find all this
is, sadly enough, to get someone who isn't in the industry at all.

Student or not, dealing with a self-employed consultant will likely get you
more personal service, more creative problem solving, and much better rates
than you would with a professional consulting agency, much of whose income
and resources go into self-promotion, image, certification programs, and
salaries for managers and owners. Plus, you won't have to deal with hold
times, rigid managers, and otherwise decent people looking uncomfortable in
business suits. And, finally, you'll know that every dollar you're paying is
going right to the person doing the work, not to some greedy desk jockey in
management. 

My experiences with the level of support one gets for "a few dollars a
month" from hosting services have been, well, unmentionable. Perhaps if your
idea of "a few" runs into the hundreds, you might get personal service above
and beyond a sullen "RTFM", or a couple lines of incoherent email, but...
yeah.

</rant>

As far as running that level of traffic over DSL, I've gotta say, I'm with
Chuq (see caveat below); not to wax paranoid, but I wonder if our
four-legged friend Mr./Ms. Desk may have vested interests in discouraging
do-it-yourself hosting. (What kind of desk is s/he? Laminate? Oak? One of
those military green steel numbers? Drawers or shelves? Inkwell?) Support
desks are often found at hosting providers -- equal-furniture employers, I
hear. Though they seldom get to chair the meetings.

Anyway. 

Within reason, I think the potential tradeoff in speed with DSL or what have
you is usually well worth the many advantages of having your box on hand
where you can mess with it, know that it's getting backed up, upgrade it
when it needs upgrading, and get console access even if the Net is acting
snaky. 

Of course, this assumes that you don't have jerky DSL providers that
withhold static IPs, cap your upstream speed, massively oversell their
lines, etcetera. At the very least, I'd ask for client references from
whatever providers you're considering.

I've hosted many a site over cable and DSL, and am now looking into
networking my block with HPNA, to share an sDSL line (soon a T1). We
currently have 18 domains hosted locally over one 384k sDSL line and
nobody's complained about speed. (Well, my main server's getting a bit
overloaded -- maybe I'll have to turn off PHP parsing of all .html files ;)
-- but the line speed is fine.)

If worse comes to worst, you can always go the hosting provider route, but
it doesn't seem that sensible to me, especially when so many providers are
still in the process of consolidating, downsizing and just plain vanishing.

 - Nathan


On 8/13/02 7:54 AM, "Support Desk" <cprg at cprg.net> wrote:

> Personally, I find DSL and Cable lines too unreliable.
> The only "paid" support you can get for Mailman is by
> hosting your site on one of the thousands of real
> full time hosting providers who offer Mailman as part
> of their hosting packages.  Many offer accounts for
> only a few dollars per month, with 99% + uptime.