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Personally I do wonder about how this sustained and why it is still on a San Jose server without rollover protection, dependent on one or two people "driving over tomorrow" to maintain. This may have been a great early on solution but not long term, definitely not sustainable. Seems moving it to the cloud, e.g., a AES server or other solution, is a fraction of the cost, becomes hardware independent, and then sustainable by future "John 2" and others.

And, the money, yes I donate and figure it is either a nice profit to Jim and John, else poorly spent. Whatever, FR is not mine and I'll enjoy it while it is up and running.

Each time FR goes down, I do pause to ask if this is it's final gasp and where I go next, again, because I see or hear absolutely nothing to suggest there is a tomorrow. I suggest, respectfully, instead of bemoaning the tomorrow being independently discussed and created, do something direct with FR, explain there is a tomorrow.

Reno is correct, instead of dedicated HW, cloud is the way to go. There are a number of pitfalls however that should also be mentioned. Cloud storage is very expensive, it will be your biggest expense by far. Some people will say, hey, I get XX GB or YY TB for free or for cheap from XYZ corp. That's true but that's considered dead storage.

But storage for FR's database will have to be live storage i.e. solid state. I pay $25 / month for 250 GB of live disk storage at digital ocean. You obviously have far more data and can do the math.

You will also be somewhat RAM limited in their offerings (unless you pay more). I believe the bandwidth and CPU should be adequate, but you'd have to check the numbers.

There's no doubt the cloud servers and storage will cost more than your dedicated HW, over the long run. It is after all, a monthly fee for HW rental (virtualized HW at that). There are major security issues with maintaining virtual servers, namely that you have to be very careful about your admin access and that you have to watch for side channel attacks from colocated virtual domains with sloppy security. However the latter is not much different from the physical network attacks in a hosting center, just an added vector to worry about.

Another consideration is that the hosting service could decide to pull the plug for political or tech reasons (or pretend it is tech when it is political). Then you will need to have a failover plan into another cloud host. But so far I have not heard of political problems with Linode, Digital Ocean, or the others I have read about.