[Typo3-typo3org] Hosting the TYPO3 sites

[Robert Lemke]

Hi folks,

if you are interested in the future of the TYPO3 sites, please read this
post and give your feedback.

As all of you know, we currently have a variety of difficulties with
TYPO3.org. Basically I'd boil these down to the following:

  a) the technical design for the documentation section and the TER causes
     too much load, a redesign is neccessary
  
  b) the current hosting solution can't cope with this load and doesn't 
     scale well, at peak times TYPO3.org is partly unusable and the TER is
     not reachable. We don't have detailed information about the reasons
     when load is too high or the site fails generally.

  c) debugging TYPO3.org is quite hard for me as I can do it only while I 
     have contact to someone of the netfielders staff. I currently have:

       - a shell account to the TYPO3.com server which has the filebase from
         TYPO3.org mounted into a directory

     what I definately need for debugging is:

       - control on restarting the webservers and flushing the accelerator
         cache
       - an (S)FTP account for the TYPO3.org filebase
       - access on the PHP error log and the Apache logfiles

The solutions we planned for these task are currently

   a) - short term:
          - refactor the current TER to be file based
          - disable other features on TYPO3.org which cause much load
          - upgrade to 3.8.0 and use caching headers / reverse proxy
      long term: 
          - create a TER 2.0
          - create a different solution for the documentation section
          - split up TYPO3.org into teams.typo3.org, documentation.typo3.org
            etc.
   b+c) ?

During the last months Kasper and I received different offers for improving
the hosting situation for TYPO3.org. Among them is Robert Meyer from
mittwaldmedien who has transferred € 3.350,- to netfielders for buying a
new server (Dual Xeon, 4GB RAM).

Another very interesting offer comes from Jürgen Egeling from punkt.de: He
does not only offer to invest quite some money and time into setting up a
professional and reliable hosting solution but also invites one or two
developers to come to Karlsruhe for planning and developing the new
extension repository. He would pay half of the daily rate for these
developers and provide working time from hist PHP developers and sysadmins.

As you can imagine, I representing the TYPO3 Association in this regard and
therefore speaking for the community cannot ignore these offers just
because I think that Jan-Hendrik is a nice person. I can't ignore this just
because I'm thankful what he did all the years for TYPO3, the lists and the
websites. 

I have discussed a lot with various people - members of the T3A, Jürgen,
Jan-Hendrik, members of the community - and finally have decided to suggest
the following solution:

  - keep the mailing lists at netfielders if they really put effort into
    switching to Sympa or making them controllable via SOAP in a certain
    way.

  - Distribute hosting of the different sites instead of having one provider 
    for all. In particular I'd like to see the following distribution if all
    parties agree:

    netfielders: www.typo3.com, edu.typo3.com, gov.typo3.com, 
                 news.typo3.org, typo3.netfielders.de
    ELIOS:       bugs.typo3.org, association.typo3.org, wiki.typo3.org
    punkt.de:    all remaining *.typo3.org, demo.typo3.com, 
                 lists.association.typo3.org

Now I ask you to give me answers and your opinion to the following
questions:

  - Do you agree with this decision?
  - Should anyone else be asked before taking this decision? We need some
    really trustworthy people and a quick and future-proof solution at the
    same time.
  - How should these topics be communicated? 

Let's take a final decision until Monday. Most of the active members of the
T3A already agreed.

Cheers,
-- 
robert