[Foundation-l] Q3 2004 hardware budget

Fri Jul 2 09:21:56 UTC 2004

I've worked out a provisional hardware budget for Q3 2004 based on our past
spending patterns. 

We may need to spend $11000 (assuming we follow last quarter's growth rate) to
$73000 (assuming a repeat of the absurd growth rate a quarter before that -
probably caused by the installation of the new server farm) on servers by the
end of third quarter (which started 1 July). Both of those figures, however,
are probably outliers and thus do not represent a trend. 

1) Averaging all growth rates since Q3 2002 gives an increase in traffic (hits)
per quarter of 90.98%, meaning a Q3 2004 budget of between $26000 to $32000.

2) Removing the last two quarters gives a 68.72% growth rate, meaning a $20000
to $24000 budget. 

3) Also removing an earlier outlier (Q1 2003's dismal 1.42% growth) gives an
average growth rate of 85.55%, meaning a $24000 to $29000 budget.

My spreadsheet is still a bit messy but I think the estimate is sound. Please
check: 

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hardware_costs.pdf
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hardware_costs.sxc 

I'm still working on getting these data in a more presentable form. The finance
department also needs to come together so we can work on an annual budget and 5
year master plan. I could do this myself if our only expenses will be hardware
related, but I imagine that we will want to expand the operations of the
foundation. Thus we need to form policy on what we want to spend money on. I
most certainly cannot do that alone. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS - I won't have hard numbers until Jimbo gets back and faxes me the last
three months of bank statements, but we should have about $27,800 total 
($9,400 in PayPal, $9000 server refund, $9000 award, and $400 misc.). 

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