That Pentium-90 is probably sucking a ton of power at this point, when it could be virtualized and you could run 50 of those boxes on an $800 Dell pizza box. I mean, they are literally running the same hardware from the 90s.
There's not really any significant room for improvement on any of those factors. You might be able to save a rack unit or two, and several watts by replacing hard drives with a SSD, but if you don't have 50 boxes to consolidate, you're still facing the baseline cost of having a box taking up some amount of physical space and requiring several watts of power. Unless you make the much bigger up-front investment of migrating to a shared hosting platform.
How many person-hours is it going to cost you to do the move from a broken box, a faulty hard-drive and/or there's a non-updateable security vulnerability on the system running on the boxes?
I had a good backups business for adult websites going around 2008. It was nothing more than rsync over ssh with a couple duplicates and I would burn some dvds and drop them in the post once a month. Was a very good business. Probably still viable, because those companies valued having physically possessable images of their config files and source code.
I've read in passing that in times past they were web technology pioneers. Seem to remember some were using Freebsd when the canonical approach was Sun etc. big iron and UNIX(TM), and Linux was perhaps not quite yet mature enough.
From what I've read, the adult industry (or, more generally, the human desire to have porn) has pioneered technology in general. I can't recall the source, but I recall reading something that said that most, if not all visual media were used for porn almost immediately after their inception.
I think porn is also something where your architecture only needs to just work, so that encourages cutting corners and occasionally creative solutions.
>From what I've read, the adult industry (or, more generally, the human desire to have porn) has pioneered technology in general. I can't recall the source, but I recall reading something that said that most, if not all visual media were used for porn almost immediately after their inception.
" Various figurines exaggerate the abdomen, hips, breasts, thighs, or vulva. In contrast, arms and feet are often absent, and the head is usually small and faceless.
The original cultural meaning and purpose of these artifacts is not known. It has frequently been suggested that they may have served a ritual or symbolic function. "
yep :) Imagine an archaeologist in the year 3000 looking at backups of our days Internet and wondering what "ritual or symbolic function" all those images and videos played...
