FTP server for small charity

eryn_kathleen

I work for a small educational charity; my job covers the publications. We're just setting up next year's budget and I'd really like to include an FTP server in our figures as it would definitely make my job easier.

We have roughly 75 publications projects on the go at any one time. Including text, tables, and illustrations, a single project can take up anywhere from 1-10 gigabytes. Rather than posting DVDs back and forth, I'd like to enable authors to upload their projects so that I can access the files. I would also put the files on the FTP servers so that our editors and typesetters could access them. At the very busiest time of the year, I can't imagine having more than 10 projects actually on the server at once - it would purely be used for transferring, not storing, files. Security is also important for anonymity during peer review.

We currently run an Exchange server at work. I know that it's a security risk to run FTP over that server, so I guess we would be looking at a new solution. I just don't know whether we should go down the hardware/DIY approach or get an online hosting service - I'm not even sure where to start with this one!

weegie.geek

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=850593 might be worth a look. FTP hosting on a box with a 100mbit pipe.

John_Gray

Have you done the calculations on how long it will take your contributors to upload data at whatever their upload transfer rate is, perhaps 384 kbps*? And considered whether any of them might fall foul of caps on their monthly transfer of data?

* I just have: around 165 MB/hour, making the unlikely assumption of 100% transfer efficiency - so don't forget to ZIP the (mostly text?) data before transferring it in either direction...

You can plug in the appropriate data rate into this website page, and choose your units!

weegie.geek

John_Gray wrote: »

Have you done the calculations on how long it will take your contributors to upload data at whatever their upload transfer rate is, perhaps 384 kbps*? And considered whether any of them might fall foul of caps on their monthly transfer of data?

* I just have: around 165 MB/hour, making the unlikely assumption of 100% transfer efficiency - so don't forget to ZIP the (mostly text?) data before transferring it in either direction...

You can plug in the appropriate data rate into this website page, and choose your units!

My thinking was more the speed at which the OP's connection can upload. The fastest upload in the UK is what, 2.5mbit, excluding costly business connections like leased lines, that I'm assuming a small charity can't afford. That could be eaten up very quickly if there are a few people downloading from him at the one time. For most people, putting a DVDR in the post and it arriving the next day is faster than their internet connection could transmit something.

eryn_kathleen

Thanks to both of you for getting my thinking cap on! Thinking over it again, I'm realising that most of the regular transfers will be text or PDF files - fairly small. Authors aren't likely to submit their entire projects to us via FTP (they have to submit printed copies anyway, so you're right - easier to drop in a DVD).

For illustrations files, the FTP server would be most useful in cases where authors are giving us replacement images (usually less than five) that are too large for email but need to be passed straight on to the typesetter or where they're sending me images that I can't view on my machine, so I can just call the typesetter and have him check them.

weegie.geek

There's also the problem of people not being au fait with FTP. They can use their email clients and add attachments, but when they start faffing around with ftp they might get confused.

If there are any images you can't view, I'm sure the free tool irfanview can view them.

eryn_kathleen

I use Irfanview, but we get a lot of ai/eps files - most of which can be viewed with the ghostscript plugin (but not all) and the drop in image quality is usually pretty bad. It does at least let me view 75-80% of the stuff that we get in.

We have Illustrator CS2 but I'm not happy with getting on Adobe's upgrade train!

John_Gray

eryn_kathleen wrote: »

We have Illustrator CS2 but I'm not happy with getting on Adobe's upgrade train!

I think the phrase you want is "Adobe's upgravy train"... :rotfl: