[HCoop-Discuss] Financial situation

[Gregor Larson]

>From my point of view, $40 or $50 per member doesn't seem excessive if
it gets us access to some stable, good-performance systems. If it
wasn't for hcoop I would probably be with bluehost.com who wants about
$170 for a 2 year contract.

Because I only joined in February, I don't really understand the new
Peer 1 arrangement. The charges to my account so far seem very modest.

Perhaps a summary statement of where we are with Peer 1, what you
think we will achieve  and and a rough estimate of the monthly costs
going forward would help us (less informed) members.

Other CO-OPs (non Internet related) I belonged to in the past required
members to buy a 'share' in the CO-OP when they joined. This share
would be refundable when the member left the co-op (assuming the CO-OP
continued). An up-front 'share' might impede new membership slightly,
but there is a certain fairness about it. I would be willing to buy a
share in hcoop.

I doesn't seem fair or sustainable for Adam to subsidize the rest of
us,  even if this is his hobby ;)

Thanks,
   - Gregor (in North Carolina, soon to be in Ottawa).


On 4/28/07, Adam Chlipala <adamc at hcoop.net> wrote:
> To recap: Peer 1 has been charging us for colocation services for a few
> months now, as we've been setting up our new servers there.  We're not
> yet ready to switch over to the new systems, though.  I have been
> working under the assumption that a reasonable slice of the membership
> would be unwilling to pay shares of the Peer 1 costs before they are yet
> receiving direct benefit from the new servers.  As a result, I haven't
> been incorporating the Peer 1 costs into the financial records on the
> portal, the idea being that, at the point when we are ready to move any
> member over, we consider all the Peer 1 costs to that point as a
> one-time cost to be split in a special way to be determined.
>
> Now, a few months into that, we have about $4000 worth of those
> charges.  I sent a request to hcoop-announce recently asking for people
> to throw in more money to help cover these costs in the mean time.  With
> the volume of people who seemed to respond to that, it's clear that only
> payments of several hundred dollars per person could make a difference,
> and that didn't happen.  I've ended up essentially paying all Peer 1
> costs from my personal funds each month.
>
> So, what should we do?  I don't have any idea how soon we'll be ready to
> switch to the new servers.  Essentially no one responded to my call to
> "lend" HCoop money in the interim.
>
> Should we call this the point where we bundle the charges so far into
> one sum that we split among willing members ASAP, and from here on bill
> monthly charges to everyone as they arrive?
>
> Or, can more of you add several hundred dollars each to your HCoop balances?
>
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