Department Cloud Server Account

Goals:

• Running Inkfish
• Developing and running other web / network apps for teaching, preferably without breaking Inkfish.

Things that haven’t worked or don’t look promising:

• Requesting a VM from the University. They effectively don’t support faculty-administered virtual servers.
• Running an Amazon cloud instance through the Research Computing Center. This service is focused on scientific computing rather than persistent virtual servers. It’s billed hourly, and backups are tricky. Running a single virtual server would realistically be about $25/month.

New proposal:

• Let’s set up a department account with a virtual server provider.
• Specifically: Linode
• Stephanie would create main account, then she could create a delegated account for me (or others) that could do technical stuff but not access billing info.
• Once we have an account, we can set me up with two virtual servers for $30/month:
  • One production Inkfish server
  • One server for development, demos, and experiments
  • Reasonable backups included

ref: Linode Estimate