Thanks to all the people who made donations, thanks to our sponsors who help us financially on a monthly basis and thanks to the income generated through ads we’re now in a much more comfortable position than we were a year ago and as our community and our needs have grown it was time we invested in a second server. So we went ahead with Michael from lintelligence.de (which you probably know as “d00p”) and bought a brand new machine which we’re now using for file hosting.
The server we were using so far is now fully dedicated to web hosting and supports our website, our forums, and all the services under www.linuxmint.com.
On the new server we’ve migrated the upload service used by the maintainers to upload the ISOs, the rsync service which lets our mirrors synchronize with our releases and importantly enough, we’ve also migrated our repositories. Of course, in order not to break anything the Daryna (and previous release) repositories are still at the same place, but starting with Elyssa we’ll be using http://packages.linuxmint.com instead.
The main advantage that this new server brings to us is that the web server (forums, website..etc) is consequently faster since it doesn’t have to deal with the mirrors, the downloads/uploads of ISOs, and soon enough the repositories anymore. It’s now fully dedicated to only one thing: Web hosting. The same thing goes for the second server as well, since it doesn’t have to deal with community web services, the file serving and the repositories will also be faster.
The other advantage of doing this is that in case of downtime only some of the services are down. So if the repositories are down and mintUpdate can’t do its job, we can still access the forums and the website, and vice-versa.
I’d like to thank the community for financially supporting us. Whether it’s through ads, sponsors or donations, Linux Mint is a project which funds come 100% from its community. This lets us focus on the distribution itself without spending time on developping associated salable products or services (Powerpacks, support..etc). It also lets us invest now and then like we did now with this new server and this is very positive.
The future will tell if this income coming from the community will be enough for Mint to grow into a full limited company and to start hiring. As we’re setting up a business here in Ireland new challenges will arise (12% corporation taxe, 20% VAT, 40% income tax, administrative paperwork..etc) but we’re also confident that the release of Elyssa will push Linux Mint to even higher grounds, increase the size of its community and hopefully let us be the 100% community funded project we’ve been so far.