I agree with Vlada here....no way in the world you get dedicated hardware at ANY host for those previously mentioned prices by kyrios. Well maybe if you get some sweet, special deal for employees or relatives. I have literally searched dozens and dozens of hosts for dedicated boxes and cloud solutions. Nothing comes close to FDC prices for the bandwidth we require but if somebody produces real numbers, as Vlada did, then we will certainly investigate fully to save money anywhere possible.

On the IRC topic. Yes we can host it ourselves as FDC just opened up that possibility recently. But for the small amount of money it is best to keep it off the servers that reboot far more often than our IRC host. If Chicago or Denver go down, and they often do for various reasons, then we lose IRC. In the grand scheme of things we need to be on multiple boxes instead of putting all our eggs in one basket.

On the Windows VPS. It is used for specialized QA software that we got a FREE license. The QA Team has found great value in this software package and it is far cheaper to host this on a VPS than pay for Windows Server licensing.


Hopefully this helps answer some questions