[tz] FW: Beginner's help request

Daniel Ford dfnojunk at gmail.com
Thu Nov 9 07:07:15 UTC 2017


Paul,

My experience with 'free' website hosts is not good.  They don't remain free for long.  If you haven't upgraded (within a few years) to something that costs, they soon change their 'policies' and shut your website down.

My own website, currently hosted for a very low monthly sum, is not sufficiently permanent to qualify for long-term TZdb mirroring.  And I don't have any contacts in the hosting industry that I could ask to host.

I have to say that I'm surprised that an organisation like IANA doesn't have the resources available to properly host the TZdb for 'general access'.  No doubt there are hidden reasons, though.  Perhaps we need a benign(?) large organisation like Google to take on that free mirroring task?  Has anyone spoken with them about it?

Regards,
Daniel



-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Eggert [mailto:eggert at cs.ucla.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2017 6:01 AM
To: Daniel Ford; Time Zone Mailing List
Subject: Re: [tz] FW: Beginner's help request

On 11/07/2017 10:38 PM, Daniel Ford wrote:
> It's a shame the whole TZdb scheme is so user-unfriendly.

To some extent it's self-defense, as we don't have the resources to be 
friendly to the billions of potential tzdb users. The main problem here 
is a resource issue, not a technical issue.

Perhaps you could help organize a set of sites willing to volunteer to 
be tzdb mirrors and to take requests from individual users. As long as 
the need is small you could mirror the data yourself. Perhaps you could 
use a free website service like Neocities, for example.



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