Much as I dislike "pre-announcing" things and spoiling the good work our
marketing folks are putting in press releases and other formal
announcements, I'd rather do that than leave problems unsolved. With all
the GIT lists now "in the street" and some PSU lists soon to be looking
for a new home as well, I'd like to mention two new options for hosting
the lists that may look attractive to some of you. These are commercial
options however, so if you have positively no money the best is to post a
description of the list to LSTSRV-L. There have been many such postings
in the past couple days and I think it would be best if the list owners
would try to spread them over several days because when I saw all these
LSTSRV-L messages I thought "Oh no, not another spam!" and I might have
deleted everything unread if LISTSERV were only a peripheral duty :-)
Anyway the first option is to pay someone to host your list on a machine
with LISTSERV. ClarkNet has had such a service for a couple months now
(write to [log in to unmask] for more info), and L-Soft is about to open a
list hosting and management service as well. Technically we are ready to
start hosting lists, we just have a couple of loose ends to tighten on
the marketing side. The price list for business and academic lists is
ready, but we're still trying to figure out how to price "personal" lists
(lists paid by an individual and not used for any commercial or
profit-making purpose). It seems other list providers have various prices
depending on whether or not you're buying other services from them and
which salesman you happen to talk to. Another issue is billing. We're not
currently able to accept credit cards, and registering for that is
proving to be about as easy as swimming across the Atlantic. In general,
incredible though it may seem, in the US it is extremely difficult to do
business unless you've already been doing business for many years. So
we're used to having to fly overseas and back just to buy the paper, so
to speak, and I don't doubt that we'll succeed eventually, but in a world
where insurance companies cancel your flood and fire insurance because
they find out you have employees in other states, there's no telling what
complications may arise and how long it will take to solve that problem.
Naturally it is quite expensive to mail monthly invoices and then collect
and deposit the checks. Currently we're billing on a quarterly basis to
minimize the impact of administrative costs.
Anyway the current prices are between $30-50/month for the kinds of lists
that have been mentioned recently. The lowest price I've ever seen from
small club-like or non-profit outfits was $10/month. I imagine that when
our survey of our competitors' pricing is over there will be a new
category somewhat in between for smaller personal lists, but I can't
promise anything. For more information, write to [log in to unmask]
Another option for the more academic lists would be to run the lists on
the Windows NT version of LISTSERV, which is finished and working, even
though it hasn't been formally released yet. The advantage of Windows NT
is that in a typical office setup you're likely to find a number of
"workgroup servers" which may run either NT, OS/2 or Windows for
Workgroups. If they run WfW, there will usually be plans to upgrade to
NT. Unless the server is low on memory, you can install LISTSERV on it
without having to buy any additional hardware. In most universities there
are central mail servers where thousands of PC mail users send their mail
using POP3 or whatever. You can have the LISTSERV PC send the mail to
these central servers, and you won't have to worry about learning unix or
fixing /etc/sendmail.cf. While you *should* ask the managers of the
central mail servers for permission, it seems that they usually have no
objection as long as you're talking about small lists. These are machines
that typically handle 10-100k mail deliveries daily. They don't do
anything else and have no angry users complaining about slow
compilations. Finally, it's not very difficult to justify upgrades to
management. They're not all that expensive to start with, and management
usually thinks more e-mail and less paper mail is good.
So if you have a workgroup server and a campus mail server, you can get
an entry-level Windows NT license for $500/year (academic) including
maintenance, support and new versions. This will let you run one huge
list, 5 small ones, or anything in between ("small" = 150 subscribers or
less). In fact you may be able to share the license with other
administrative lists to split the costs, and once the PC people realize
what LISTSERV can do for them, they should have no problem justifying a
license upgrade.
Eric
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