Hello everyone,

I forwarded this email to our Online Department (of which I'm a member).
Since my "expertise" is more with content, design, and management, I
specifically solicited feedback from our more technical guy, Dean. Here's
what he had to say. (Keep in mind that we're planning on using Drupal, so we
wouldn't be ideal candidates for CoPress Hosting anyway.)

I don't like the idea of sharing a server with other papers, the primary
reason being that if another site receives record traffic the response time
of our site will suffer as an result. The specifications for the server
hosting all the virtual servers is actually lower than what I was planning
for our site only. To put it in perspective, the desktop in my dorm is much
better configured than that server.

Their hosting plan also seems to be geared towards wordpress, which is much
less demanding resource wise than drupal.

My current two ideas for hosting is colocation which is essentially means we
build a server and send it to a datacenter(lots in Raleigh) and they take it
from there, connecting us to their their network. The main advantage there
is that we can have a very powerful and dependable server that takes
advantage of the latest technologies and is optimized for Drupal, that we
can also access very easily for upgrades and troubleshooting since it's in
Raleigh.There's a upfront cost for the server (about $2000-3000), but if you
work it out over a 12-24 month period, with a server equivelent of a $700
monthly plan it makes a lot of sense.

There is also Amazon EC2 which may offer greater flexibility when there is
large traffic, but the costs may be higher depending on the type of traffic
we get.

Hopefully you find his feedback helpful. If you'd like to get in touch with
him to ask him questions or otherwise pick his brain, let me know! Despite
what he said about the technical aspects of the server, I think the hosting
service CoPress is offering is a great idea and will be well-received. I
guess it all depends on how many papers switch to WordPress, though, doesn't
it?

Thanks for inviting me to be a part of CoPress. I'm going to let Kevin,
Daniel, Greg, etc. do all the wonderful work they're doing (and have been
doing for quite some time), but please don't hesitate to look to me for
feedback (I'm full of opinions) or for help with anything.

Thanks, and have a great New Year's celebration.

Alex Klein
Duke '11