[HCoop-Discuss] Think of free speech, not free beer.

[Terrence Brannon]

It sounds like you think we should become the sourceforge of
webhosting. Everyone initially gets a generous allotment of space.
Everyone is approved quite easily. 75% of the people dont even use 10%
of their allotted resources while 5% has to make periodic requests for
resource increases.

I'm more in favor of  "From each according to his usage, to each
according to his needs"

One of the people I recruited for this place is probably using 3 megs
of disk space and probably next to no bandwidth (forgot his name - he
runs a retreat chalet in the New England area). Whereas I am pushing
10 gigs of disk space. And that does not count my MySQL usage which is
going to skyrocket since I just installed Drupal.

The spectrum of usage profiles is quite broad and it is not fair to
treat everyone like a number and have other people paying for my disk
space and bandwidth for me.

Most non-profit cooperatives and most commericlal hosting situations
have tiered membership levels: the more you pay and/or the more you
help out, the more you get. Such a model is sustainable.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone like the guy I recruited and ask
if you feel like shelling out money on my behalf. You'd have to have
above-average altruism or below-average business sense to buy into
something like that.

To summarize, I am completely in favor of quantifying resource usage
in every way imaginable and rationing out expenses as a function of
such usage. But I am also in favor of HCoop collecting 30-50% above
the due amount (or demanding a fixed extra amount from all members) so
that they have adequate cash buffer for whatever reasons, seen and
unforseen.