The high cost of supporting wiki system upgrades

Some reflections on the costs of operating a Confluence wiki, which probably apply to any other commercial wiki software. Bobsgear license is up for annual renewal, and I'm considering carefully whether the ability to have access to new versions, and support, and all the hidden costs of doing upgrades, are really worth it for a system that is running alright as is. My conclusion is that I'd like to pay the renewal just support Atlassian, the other benefits of renewal have a too high hidden cost. But maybe there is a way to lower those hidden costs...

Open Letter to Atlassian about renewals.....

I appreciate the sales reminders to upgrade my license. I appreciate the benefits of upgrading which include the right to use all the upgrades during the period of the renewal, ability to get support, access to source code, etc.

Benefits of support that come with renewing

How worthwhile are they if you don't do the upgrades?

For me, with www.bobsgear.com, the benefits of the being able to use the latest software are of no use if I'm not planning to upgrade the system. And knowing that whatever version I'm using is probably past the end of life support, even if it isn't you guys are generally too busy to provide patches to old releases. (Besides, I'd rather see you put your effort into the latest release anyhow, so no argument from me on your priorities.) As long as I'm not doing anything too outlandish, the confluence running bobsgear is pretty stable. If it started running into problems, I'm sure the first step in the answer would be upgrade to the latest version. Fortunately I'm not needing to ask any such questions. So practically speaking, since bugging you guys with Bobsgear bugs isn't worthwhile either, the ability to get support isn't a big draw either.

It isn't so easy to generate hundreds of dollar of year in adsense revenue

I was hopeful when I bought the $1200 license for confluence software for Bobsgear that it would become self supporting. Unfortunately, it's difficult to create stand alone sites that get a lot of traffic and a lot of click throughs to advertising. There is too much emphasis these days on off-site factors to rank your site and generate traffic. If you don't spend a lot of time doing the offsite promotion, you'll never get to the big traffic levels.

Despite a lot of effort developing a variety of useful and unique content, Bobsgear does not generate enough adsense revenue to pay for the annual Confluence renewal, let alone a contribution to the cost of the domain name or hosting, or any of the other time I spend supporting the system doing backups, occassional restarts, maintaining the VM it runs in, etc. None of the 22 accounts using up my licensed user counts ever visits to contribute, so it's not even worthwhile there. I can't get my friends who need jobs to come and consistently author wiki content, even if I pay them. Sigh...

Note to Atlassian about per-user licensing: I wish there was an easy web based way to remove those user accounts and free up the slots, but the ones who created some pages can't be removed via Confluence administrative web interface. I could probably frob the database directly, but somehow I keep finding more important things to do than risk breaking this system...

If you're behind on upgrades, the catching up isn't easy

Let make sure I understand correctly: If I'm several x.1.x releases back, (2.4.3), to get up with the latest release 2.8.2, I would have to upgrade to each of 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and then 2.8.2 correct? I bet even if everything went well, doing all the backups and testing at each step, it sounds like a couple of days of full work. Even if I did space exports to xml, I believe those won't load on a different x.1 release of Confluence, right? Besides there are 300+ private spaces in Bobsgear for a project I was doing to populate domains with content, it would take forever to use the web interface to export each one individually, the whole group is too large for the usual confluence backup. Actually, I probably only want to port some of the spaces in the upgrade, 250 of the spaces I can actually throw away... Except I've got a couple of spaces where I used a script to dump 10K pages into then, and now those are overloading the system when I try to change those spaces.... Either way, it's not worth all the effort, the system is working just fine as a personal blogging platform, the heck with collaboration here. People making comments is good enough. Sigh...

Most important upgrade would be to change my mind about the backend database

Another issue that would come up for me is that bobsgear is running with a postgresql back end. It was a useful exercise to set up Confluence on a LAMP stack. But I don't know postgresql as well as sql server 2005, and if I wanted to put improvements into bobsgear, moving it's database to sql server 2005 would be higher on my list than upgrading the confluence it runs.

Whichever way I go, there is a considerable cost in time and effort to upgrade this system. It overshadows the cost of the license by a considerable factor.

But I'd really like to support Atlassian by renewing

I think for me and my current plans, renewing my license is just a donation, a vote of confidence, to Atlassian.

However, I would like to send Atlassian my renewal fee, mostly as a vote of confidence and support. But I already have a number of charitable projects I'm involved in, so as a business man, I need to think carefully about how can I benefit from renewing my Confluence license, and not just be donating to donate. There are a couple of options I can consider:

• Maybe I just buy a whole new license for one of my other domains. Fortunately, when your confluence support expires, you're still allowed to use the software sans support and upgrades. Maybe I just pay for a fresh license, and start a fresh installation on a fresh domain and system.
• Maybe I just renew, and plan to do an upgrade of Bobsgear. Renewal licenses are half the cost of a fresh first year license, so this would be less expensive.

So how can I make the whole upgrade, move the database around, etc., process easier for myself?

Are other confluence owners not renewing and upgrading for the same reasons?

A while back I was hunting on the net for public instances of Confluence. Here is the list of what I found: Survey Of Confluence Wiki Installations.

It's been a while since I updated the survey. One of the things that impressed me was the number of people running ancient versions of Confluence. Could it be that they've looked at their situations, like I looked at mine, and decided it is just too much effort to do the upgrades? Could this be lowering Atlassian's renewal rate?

A possible solution to make upgrading Confluence easier

I came up with an idea about my renewal, and how I could make the upgrade process accomplish all the things I need to do. Please see my proposal for Move Your Confluence Content To A New Instance Utility.