Had yet another complaint sent in by email yesterday from someone frustrated by our tryout proxy servers at pickaproxy.com being unavailable most of the time. I understand, and we have been working on addressing this for a few months. The infrastructure requirements are not trivial, however, to be able to scale this service, and we have decided not to simply upgrade to a 2x or 4x bigger dedicated server. Currently we are handling an average of nearly 400,000 new objects each day in our web accelerator cache, and I suspect this would be much higher if we could handle more.
I asked this frustrated user what they would be willing to pay on a monthly subscription basis to have our service available for x hours a day, since this is one of the options we are considering. Not everyone will be able to pay, we know, but for those of you who are willing and able, I would appreciate hearing your views.
Another option - since we have yet to find anyone who is prepared to sponsor a separate server - is to license our server to organizations who can set it up for their own users. This would mean they supply their own hardware and infrastructure and we license our server software to them, likely for something like $599 or $999 per year, which would include all upgrades and fixes. In this case, scability can be controlled because there would be a finite number of users to serve. This should appeal to businesses, government departments, media organizations, and many others who need to give their users an ad hoc way to use the Internet in a mostly anonymous way without requiring tens or hundreds or thousands of downloads, installs, configurations and constants upgrades.
Let us know what you think.
