[Hcoop-discuss] Help plan our next server set-up!

[Adam Chlipala]

I'm sending this message to enlist your help in planning the dream geek 
hosting set-up for the next stage of HCoop's existence.  If you're 
interested in participating, please read through this message.  You'll 
find my precise call for help at the end.

Yesterday we reached the auspiciously palindromic member count of 55.  
On February 1st, I'll split the remainder of the costs for our new 
server and tax exemption application among the members at that time.  
That will leave us with a cost a $3.82/member/month.

I must say, "not bad!"  Our costs seem to beat pretty much anything out 
there.  The first web site I found when searching for a site to search 
out web hosting providers has "under $5" as its lowest category. :-)  
There are still some cheaper deals, but I'm sure none are as flexible 
and democratic as ours, and our price will continue to drop as 
membership increases.

So, with that said, isn't this a great time to expand our services and 
increase the price? :-D

A few months back, I created this wiki page to summarize why we need to 
expand and to organize plans on doing so:
    http://wiki.hcoop.net/wiki/ColocationPlans

That was shortly after we had completed migration of users to the new 
server, as well as other set-up tasks.  I think we are now stable enough 
that it makes sense to focus on new, larger scale plans.

To summarize the wish list items that drive this change (in rough order 
of importance), we need or would like:
- More reliability and redundancy via back-up mechanisms and multiple 
servers (this one implies, to me, that we need a shared filesystem like 
AFS provides)
- Support for member purchase of arbitrary amounts of disk space
- An adequately responsive and active human administration system
- Separate "production," "development," and "shell" servers
- Hardware goodies like serial console and hardware firewall

I think we can begin planning our next set-up now and determine how much 
it will cost.  Based on that cost, we can determine if we are ready yet, 
or if we should seek more members first.

I'd like to ask anyone who is interested in planning this to identify 
himself to this list and become part of a semi-official "committee."  
We're still experimenting with ways to get everyone involved in decision 
making over the Internet, and less formalized attempts to divide up work 
haven't always worked well in the past, so I thought I'd try this.