Got a call from my ISP this morning; a special deal I’d been getting for colocation of my server for the past ten years is going away at the end of November. Unless I can come up with approximately $160/month after that (for 1RU, one Ethernet drop, one static IP, 1megabit sustained bandwidth usage), I will have to find a new home for the machine. This will affect this site and all of the other mailing lists and services I run on the machine.

The system is currently located in Austin, TX, and I’m in Houston. If I move it, I would prefer moving it to somewhere in Houston, but the system has a serial console and I can pretty much do all management from anywhere.

Suggestions of colo providers (especially in Houston) will be GREATLY appreciated. Please contact mrbill@sunhelp.org.

UPDATE: Situation not so dire, see the next post.

According to this Register article, Oracle will be eliminating the Basic and Silver support options for MySQL (unless customers lock themselves into a 3-year contract now) and increasing prices on the remaining options.

This blog post has more thoughts on the matter from someone involved with the Postgresql side of things.

Personally, I think this is turning into a textbook example of how to buy a company, and then shoot yourself in the foot and drive away customers. Oracle’s “We’re the phone company, we don’t have to care”-type attitude may work with its Oracle database, but it certainly won’t work with smaller markets like MySQL (which has a perfectly free competitor in Postgresql) or the Solaris OS.