Paul,

I won't rule out "rented" space, but we have to be extremely cautious about any arrangement that requires ongoing regular expenditures. Often the ETS Foundation bank balance is a big fat zero. Budgeting is difficult. The last server cost us virtually nothing for 8 years. I'd expect the new one to last a long time as well. Dave is going to give me our bandwidth use for the past 12 months so we can get a feel for the costs involved if we had to pay for it. I think we're up to about 7-8 GB of storage, as I recall, but don't quote me on that. At times the bandwidth use is mind boggling. All that has to happen is some terrorist incident or major survival incident or natural disaster and it goes through the roof.

I would prefer a RAID array over multiple drives because it allows us to continue uninterrupted if one disk fails. That and power supplies seem to be the most common failure point and most of the rack servers I've been looking at have dual power supplies. In any case, we're just getting into this and where we end up is anybody's guess. Because of our arrangements, simply haven't given it a lot of thought, so just coming up to speed now.