<div>I have no problems with the current arrangement, in which fixed operating expenses aren't distributed based on resource consumption. But if we're gong to start talking about who's subsidizing whom, then it seems to me that the only equitable arrangement is to divvy it up based solely on usage. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Or we could just drop the issue and not point fingers at other people as being freeloaders. That's my preference. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>I'm not sure why I'm even arguing with you, because you didn't say anything about subsidies. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Slightly unrelated: this company Slicehost (now owned by Rackspace) look interesting. Xen-based virtualization. Kind of cool. Hmm. <br></div>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 10:00 AM, 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>> So your claim is that our overhead costs are over 55 times those of<br>> Amazon? (Peer1 costs are fixed overhead rather than per unit with<br>> respect to bandwidth, CPU, and disk usage.)<br>
<br></div>Since we're providing our own servers, Peer 1 costs are independent of<br>CPU or disk usage. We also have their cheapest bandwidth plan, I think,<br>which we don't come close to saturating. Thus, taking our current<br>
hosting plan as fixed, there's very little justification for linking<br>shares of Peer 1 costs to member resource usage. We're paying for space<br>that could be used to host much more expensive and powerful hardware,<br>
but instead we're filling it with low-powered donated machines. In<br>essence, we're seriously underutilizing the resources Peer 1 is giving<br>us, but we're saving on our own non-monthly hardware costs by doing so.<br>
We couldn't do very much better with another colo provider, since slow<br>servers can take up as much space as fast servers.<br><br>Again, I won't dispute that this leaves us with high fixed overhead, and<br>I'm starting to feel more amenable to switching to some virtualized<br>
solution, but I _don't_ believe that it makes sense to say that members<br>using low amounts of bandwidth, CPU, or disk "obviously deserve" to pay<br>less of Peer 1 costs than members with high usage, as long as we don't<br>
come close to overgrowing what can fit in our quarter cabinet.<br>
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