Russel,
Re point 1 comparing commercial sites to the AIS site, you said of commercial sites:
If they fall over you WILL go elsewhere
And if the AIS site falls over? It puts our safety at risk. I'd say this is at least as important.
The cost of running a site such as Yahoo or Amazon is not related to availability. It is related to the fact that these sites hold a massivate amount of data. Lots of data requiers lots of storage space to store the data on, which is expensive. They are also global sites, requiring the data to be replicated to vast number of servers around the world. In the case of Amazon, customer orders must be taken in real-time, and backed up in real-time - again, this is expensive.
All that is required to maintain availability of the AIS website is two independant servers. This is not expensive - I don't know the details of the hardware they're running, but we may be talking 5-figure sums, certainly not 8 figures like Evo was talking about. (I'm not familiar with that project, Evo, but I'd guess the cost was due to the need for real time replication.) Real time replication is not required for this application - the NOTAMs can be manually copied from the main site to the backup site after they are periodically updated. And the procedures for handling a failure of the main site would then be to contact the ISP and ask them to re-direct the domain name to the backup site.
There is
no technical reason why the AIS site can't be made reliable for a very small cost. Lots of people on this thread are comparing apples with oranges. (I probably shouldn't have mentioned Yahoo - it's a good comparison in terms of reliability, but not in terms of cost, for the reasons I've mentioned.)
Of course, making the information
useful is an entirely different prospect to making it available.
FFF
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