Student Name: Laibah Erum

Student ID: 35569772

Public IP: 13.53.130.168

Project Proposal

This proposal outlines the total cost of ownership (TCO) for hosting a self-hosted Jitsi Meet video conferencing server on an AWS EC2 instance running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The objective of this project is to compare the three server hosting solutions: owning a physical server, renting rack space, and IaaS (AWS EC2), to determine the most cost-effective and scalable solution for the long term.

Jitsi Meet is an open-source video conferencing tool that supports secure, real-time communication with screen sharing, chat, and recording features. This project involves deploying and configuring a cloud Jitsi Meet server to prevent excessive dependence on SaaS vendors like Zoom to ensure data privacy, cost savings, and full customization.

The total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis considers three methods:

• Physical Server – A Dell PowerEdge R740xd2 server would be $184,047 over five years with hardware, electricity, cooling, IT staff, and internet fees.
• Rack Space – Leasing rack space in a data center would be $55,639 over five years with minimal hardware and maintenance costs but still with operational fees.
• Cloud (AWS EC2) – Hosting Jitsi Meet on AWS EC2 offers the most cost-effective solution, with a five-year TCO of $24,234, comprising an EC2 instance, Amazon RDS, RAID-0 backup, and domain registration.

Using AWS EC2, this project benefits from scalability, cost savings, and ease of management, which is the best choice for hosting a video conferencing application.

License Rationale

Jitsi Meet is published under the Apache 2.0 License, which allows for modification, redistribution, and commercial use . This license has been utilized as it provides open-source flexibility without restrictive limitations and is thus ideal for self-hosting and customizable implementations.

Apache 2.0 allows organizations to extend and customize features, offering long-term saving of costs and sustainability. This project has affordable scalability, security customization, and data privacy, in line with open-source cloud-based best practices.

Licensed under Apache 2.0