[HCoop-Discuss] HCoop and Ping! Magazine Article

[Adam Chlipala]

OK, as promised, here are the questions from the web hosting magazine 
reporter for his article on alternative hosting providers, along with my 
initial answers to them.  I haven't mailed this to him yet.  Please give 
it a read if you're interested, and let me know if we should add or 
change anything.  I'll send the revised version to him by early Monday.

Reece Sellin wrote:
> 1.) I suppose one of the points our readers will be most interested in
> is reliability and overall quality-of-service -- probably the two main
> issues when anyone evaluates a hosting provider, regardless of their
> business model.  Has it been your experience that a coop providing
> hosting services is able to maintain a level of reliability/uptime and
> support that's similar to what one would normally get from a
> mainstream hosting account?

I've never used a mainstream hosting provider, so I don't know what is 
common there.  However, our current main server has an uptime of 432 
days.  The main source of outages has been network hardware failure at 
our hosting providers that are beyond our control in the short term, 
though I like to think we are making better decisions on colo providers 
as time goes on and our spending power increases.

I think our member support quality is significantly better than the 
average mainstream provider's.  The secret ingredient here is letting 
members (even those who haven't volunteered for particular admin roles) 
support other members.  This happens through our IRC channel, mailing 
lists, and member support web portal.  The portal allows any member to 
"subscribe" to any category of support requests, giving him the chance 
to read requests for help from others and suggest solutions.

This is not to say that our small set of volunteer admins is 
unresponsive.  On the contrary, we often receive compliments on the 
speed of our service.  I think this can be explained in part by a basic 
rule of human psychology that has been validated experimentally.  In 
particular, the more someone is compensated for doing a job through 
generic rewards like money, the less motivated he feels to do the job 
well.  Our admins have a personal interest in the co-op and enjoy 
contributing, so they pursue their duties with gusto. :)

> 2.) On a bit of a related point to 1.), do you have many business
> "customers" (rather than individuals) who are members?

We are open to the possibility of members that are corporations rather 
than individuals, but no one has taken us up on this offer yet.  We do 
have a few members supporting their individual businesses through 
HCoop.  For example, we have the web site of a hypnosis private practice 
and at least one web site for a shareware program.

> 3.) I would imagine that there would be a far higher level of
> "community" involved in a coop hosting enterprise -- which would seem
> to give it a fairly major advantage in terms of things that you
> normally don't see at a commercial hosting provider... here I'm
> thinking of things such as a community you could go to if you're
> having problems building a webapp or coding some PHP, for example.
> Would you agree that's the case?

Absolutely.  I've already mentioned the non-traditional options we offer 
for tech support.  We have a hierarchy of mailing lists, where members 
have the options of subscribing to different lists.  For instance, on 
the "miscellaneous" list, anything is fair game, even subjects not 
related to the co-op.  We often see useful discussions there on a wide 
range of technical topics, and even such out-of-the-ordinary exchanges 
as arrangements to share the costs of importing olive oil from 
Palestinian providers who've come into hard times during recent events.  
Try to find THAT anywhere near a commercial hosting provider. :D

We also have a wiki at http://wiki.hcoop.net/ that all members are free 
to edit, in standard wiki fashion, which collects a variety of 
information both specific to HCoop and of general interest to folks 
running UNIX-based Internet services.

> 4.) What would a typical "member" expect to pay, and what would they
> receive in terms of bandwidth/storage space.  Also, what type of
> server architecture do you sue?

Feel free to use the word "member" without scare quotes.  The concept of 
members is codified legally in our bylaws, so it's completely accurate 
to use the word. :)

Now, before giving the answers you are probably looking for, I want to 
stress something important.  As a non-profit corporation whose legal 
existence is based on all decision-making being tied somehow to voting 
by members, the sky is really the limit in terms of what hosting 
arrangements are possible and at what costs.  Every year, members elect 
three of their number to serve on the board of directors, and these 
directors make day-to-day decisions on exactly what services we should 
provide and at what cost.  So, the big message here is that we are more 
a framework for creating hosting platforms to meet member needs than we 
are a particular "hosting company" with set "packages" like you'll find 
at mainstream providers.

Nonetheless, I can tell you about what we've settled into currently.  
Our rates change from month to month, as we focus on figuring monthly 
expenses for the whole co-op and then dividing them evenly among the 
current members.  In this way, prices go down automatically as new 
members join.

In our current set-up, the cost over the last one-month period to a 
single member was under $2.  This includes flexibility that is very hard 
to find with any shared hosting providers anywhere.  For instance, we 
install reasonable Debian Linux packages for our members on demand, 
without charging extra, and members are allowed to run their own 
daemons, even those that they write themselves in their favorite 
programming languages.  Critical to making this feasible are some of our 
unique efforts at solving security problems that haven't been considered 
much before.

Bandwidth hasn't been much of an issue yet, given the kinds of people 
attracted to our co-op.  Our current dedicated server contract includes 
1 TB of bandwidth a month, and we (the whole co-op) have used under 10% 
of that over the past month.  Disk space is similar.  A significant 
minority of members would like to use many gigabytes of storage space, 
but most stick to mostly textual content and only use a few hundred 
megabytes.  We use disk quotas and set default quotas at a few gigabytes.

We're working on setting up a new set of servers in Peer 1 colocation 
now, and one of our primary motivations for switching to a more 
expansive set-up is making it easy to expand with disk space and similar 
hardware resources to meet member demand.  This increases our base 
expenses significantly, so we've come up with a "sliding scale" scheme 
where members can pledge to pay extra while we work on building our 
member base.  With the current state of sliding scale pledges, 
membership will be available for no more than $4/mo..  This includes all 
of the services we offer now, plus new goodies like a shared AFS 
filesystem that members will be able to mount from home.

In this new set-up, we expect to charge market rates for above-average 
disk and bandwidth usage.  That is, it won't cost any more to use extra 
hardware than it would cost to use that hardware at home.  In fact, it 
will cost less, since we can buy in bulk.

In further answer to your question about server architecture, we are 
strictly a Debian Linux shop right now.  We use a number of custom 
system management tools developed by me and others to suit our unique 
setting.  You should be able to find information about these and other 
architecture issues on our wiki.

> 5.) Is there anything else you would like to add? :-)

Only that all of the answers I've given here should be findable on our 
web site/wiki by interested potential members.  If anyone has any 
questions left after poking around starting at http://hcoop.net/ , he 
should follow the directions in our prospective member FAQ there for 
letting us know, so that we can include them for future visitors' benefit!

> 6.) In terms of quotes, or when referring to you in the article, would
> it be correct to call you "a Director of HCoop.net"?

That would be almost accurate.  Our legal corporate name is "HCoop, 
Inc.", and we refer to ourselves as "HCoop" in contexts like yours.  So 
"a director of HCoop" would be fine.  I'm also the elected president 
within the board of directors, so "HCoop president" would probably work 
even better.