Once upon a time, Lamar Owen lowen@pari.edu said:
Absolutely. I would think mirror operators would love to reduce the load on their servers, which this would as I've envisioned it. And their bandwidth bill might even go down.
I'll chime in with seth here: most mirrors probably don't result in bandwidth bills.
Is bandwidth paid for? Yes. However, if my mirror resulted in higher bandwidth bills, it'd be shut off immediately. We pay for several pipes (unmetered connections), and it just so happens that we use more inbound traffic on those pipes than outbound. My mirror just uses available outbound bandwidth (I'm working on a way for it to dynamically use nearly _all_ available outbound bandwidth, without impacting normal outbound traffic, but I'm not quite done yet). When we have a link go down, the first thing I do is throttle back the mirror bandwidth.
The only thing this mirror has ever cost the company is for a little bit of power and cooling, some rack space (which we have extra), and some of my time (but not much of that during work hours either). I'd like to upgrade it some, but I can't really; it is screwball hardware that I can't find RAM for anymore (anyone got 128MB SIMMs for an Intergraph 625R?).