[afnog] Sponsor Proposal (Read)

[Brian Candler]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 03:50:27PM +0300, Badru Ntege wrote:
>    any learned comment on this posting should one send to the trash bin
>    or should it be considered.

The guy is asking for:

* free bandwidth, power and hosting
* permission to run a service which is notoriously prone to attracting DoS
  attacks

In return, you are permitted to show one advertisement to each of *his*
customers when they connect. If they connect with a GUI IRC client, they
might not even see this. Furthermore, his customer base may not be suitable
targets for your marketing.

If it were me, I'd make him pay for colo and bandwidth just like any other
customer; if he has a viable business model then he can find the money for
that. Even if I took him on as a fully paying customer, I'd still be
concerned about monitoring his IRC activities and the extra workload that
fending off DoS is likely to give you.

Feel free to subsidise his business if you wish, but I personally can't see
a particularly good reason to do so. Perhaps if you already have a large
local base of IRC users, who are using some distant IRC server, they might
benefit from having a local one. But equally you might find that most of
your customers are using MSN, AIM, Yahoo etc, in which case there's no
point.

Here's another way to think about it: if one of your competitors took him up
on his offer, would this be detrimental to your own business?

And another: if you took the cost of supplying him with bandwidth, colo and
management and treat it as a recurring marketing expense, could you find
more effective ways to spend that marketing money locally?

Regards,

Brian.