[afnog] Sponsor Proposal (Read)

[Badru Ntege]

Thanks Brian

In other words a small or even big (which is relative) african ISP with high
Bandwidth and power costs should see little or no benefit in going down this
road. 

I just thought we need to have issues like these highlighted I see no
business case infact if an IRC server is needed for customer support I
believe we can build local services and save our costly international
bandwidth.

Thanks again for the response.  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian Candler [mailto:B.Candler at pobox.com] 
> Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 6:08 PM
> To: Badru Ntege
> Cc: afnog at afnog.org
> Subject: Re: [afnog] Sponsor Proposal (Read)
> 
> 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.