That's primarily what I was hoping for...that we could put it to some more full use given that we're paying for it...however, unlike most here, I have no mail via Hcoop, as I have numerous other web based email services for that (Juno/Yahoo/etc) so that wouldn't help me...but having it as some limited backup system would...even if it would only be able to supply a "we're having problems page" for my site instead of a not found error...that has led to some users of mine wondering what happened...so a place to post system status would be my one suggestion for now.

And using it for development might be an option if I were able to use it to try out new CGI scripts for my site...but not sure if that would be possible...I'm mainly a Windows guy..so....
 
I realize the need to split costs evenly...just hoping to get some benefit for my cost..
Because, are we as a whole, getting $50 a month value from our fees paid to Xiolink?
That's $600 a year minimum for a system that appears, to my limited knowledge of it, way underutilized...   

-- ntk@hcoop.net wrote:
We could put more services on it, perhaps backup MX, which would be very good to prevent bounced mail during
network or other outages.  And as Shaun pointed out, right now if fyodor
were to go down altogether, it would be minimally several days before we
rebuilt it from scratch (and hopefully you've backup up your files &
mail!).  
But the #1 thing it is useful for is just a generic Linux shell server for
development and whatnot.  
But regardless, we have no choice but to split the costs among hcoop users
if we are to keep it online, which leads to...

The problem is that HCOOP has to pay the whole sum for hosting Abu every
month no matter what.  It's not like it costs us $1.50 per user to host
Abu, it costs us a flat fee of $50+bandwidth to host it every month.  
We can't just carve up HCOOP's overhead expenses piecemeal and ask members
to pick and choose which they want to pay for.