<div>OK, point taken on the democratic stuff. Fair or not, I think we still need to remember that many users will flee if they see a perceived cheaper service somewhere else. (At least, I suspect that to be the case--I know that if Dreamhost were a lot cheaper than HCoop, I'd go with Dreamhost.) </div>
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<div>We should try to put a price tag on hardware support. It's easy to figure out the monthly cost of a VPS, so once we decide how much we're going to pay for staffing (if we're going to pay for staffing, which it sounds like there's some consensus on), we can at least estimate how much staff time would be spent on hardware support if we go that route. It's a good comparison to make.</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Adam Chlipala <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:adamc@hcoop.net">adamc@hcoop.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; PADDING-LEFT: 1ex" class="gmail_quote">
<div class="im">Daniel Margolis wrote:<br>> We can also do ideology, as you hint at. If some users believe in the<br>> idea and want to pay more, that's cool, too. It's not something I want<br>> to have to count on.<br>
<br></div>It's more than just "ideology," since I think there is rational reason<br>to expect fairer pricing and other policies from a democratic,<br>non-profit organization than from a commercial company.<br>
<div class="im"><br>> If I wanted to get an idea of the current cost of hardware and<br>> hardware maintenance, where would I start looking?<br><br></div>Almost all of our hardware acquisitions over the last few years have<br>
been donations, with no particular cost to the co-op. I think we've<br>spent around $1000 on all hardware purchased over the last few years.<br>In my book, this is a negligible cost, as it's about the same as we pay<br>
for normal monthly costs.<br><br>The installation and maintenance (and emergency response, if you meant<br>to lump that in) is another story. All of it is done by volunteers, so<br>it's hard to put a price tag on it. Any big change to the hardware<br>
configuration has tended to eat up tens of volunteer hours or<br>thereabouts, I believe.<br>
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