[HCoop-Discuss] HCoop and Ping! Magazine Article

[Nathan Kennedy]

Looks good to me.  You might also want to mention something about the size
of our cooperative (what is it, 111 members now), to give some
perspective.

Also rather than just say you've never used a mainstream provider (which I
guess is true for you), it would be worth pointing out that "mainstream
hosting provider" is a rather amorphous term, as there is enormous
variability in the nature and quality of commercial hosting services out
there.  Some have huge customer bases and some are one-man fly-by-nights,
and from my support experience I know that within both categories there
are plenty of lousy, slow, unreliable hosts.

-ntk

> 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.
>
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