[HCoop-Discuss] Financial situation

[Justin S. Leitgeb]

Adam Chlipala wrote:
> Justin S. Leitgeb wrote:
>   
>> Thank you for suggesting this, Aaron.  I think that the 10% figure that 
>> you cited is a very reasonable way to get HCoop to start saving money.  
>>   
>>     
>
> I've been in favor of this all along for the "Some Day" category, but it 
> just hasn't been clear yet that we have good enough estimates of costs.
>
> I want to pose one distinction that matters if members are paying 
> unequal costs, say, for different disk usage amounts.  Do we add a 
> percentage to the co-op's total costs and then divide that up (not 
> including member resource usage costs), or do we add a mark-up onto each 
> member's monthly bill (including costs peculiar to each member)?
>
>   
I can see pros and cons to both.  I would just ask, first, though if you 
are planning on implementing a program whereby members can purchase 
arbitrary amounts of disk space effective immediately?  If so, I would 
say that we should add a mark-up that is higher for members using lots 
of resources.  Then we could add 10% for a "Maintenance/Upgrade Fee" 
based on what each member is paying to their monthly cost.  If we are 
going to implement the ability to purchase arbitrary amounts of 
resources later I would suggest that we just divide current costs by the 
number of members, take 10% of that, and charge it to each member 
effective immediately.  We can always revise things later when we add 
new membership options, and this would allow us to start saving immediately.

As far as the estimate on costs, I assume that you are referring to what 
we would possibly have to upgrade/repair at any given time, and 
therefore the goal of what the Coop should have in reserve?  I guess 
that this figure is really up for discussion, and will probably be 
revised quite frequently as we grow.  Currently, I would take into 
consideration the following:

1) We have at the moment two servers that are not covered under support 
contracts, and one that is mostly covered (correct me if I'm wrong 
here).  I think that we should try to have enough money on hand as soon 
as possible to replace an entire server (entire backplanes do go bad, 
and we should be prepared to handle something like this).  To get a 
strong replacement for one of our machines I would estimate that we 
should have around $6,000 or so on hand.

2) You mentioned that a paid staff might be in the future of the Coop.  
This would mean that we'd have to have considerable resources on hand 
and I have no idea where to start with this.

3) Infrastructure upgrades and bandwidth upgrades could come up at any 
time based on usage spikes, or even things that happen externally from 
our setup such as surges in the amount of spam that we have to handle.  
Because of this we should keep extra money on hand that would cover more 
than regular repairs, e.g., enough money to cover an additional server 
or two. 

4) I think that we should keep in mind that although the Peer 1 
configuration is going to be a much more reliable internet connection, 
in effect we are multiplying the number of single points of failure in 
our infrastructure by quite a bit (e.g., we have one fileserver, one web 
server, one switch at the moment).  I think that although capacity will 
be fine at Peer 1 will be fine for a while, we should start aiming for 
redundancy immediately (e.g., how soon can we save up for a second file 
server to cluster with deleuze so that one can go down for a bit for 
upgrades or repairs?)

Based on the notes above, I don't think we'll have enough money to 
really be "comfortable" for quite some time.  Would something like 
$10,000 be a good initial goal to keep on reserve?  At any rate, I think 
that although the exact amount that we should keep on reserve will 
always be up to individual opinions and a multitude of other factors, it 
is clear enough that we need to have something on hand that we shouldn't 
delay our decision to start saving *something* any longer.  So I would 
stick with the 10% of flat costs if we aren't ready to charge varying 
amounts for resource usage, or 10% of what each member is paying, 
including charges for high disk space usage if we are really ready to 
offer that option immediately.