[HCoop-Discuss] Revised answers to interview questions

[Adam Chlipala]

Here are my revisions to the interview answers I posted earlier, based 
on feedback so far.  I still plan to send off the official answers by 
early Monday.

There is one change I said that I would make, in an earlier message. 
That was coming from leitgebj's suggestion to mention environmental 
issues.  After mulling it over further, I came to the conclusion that 
there wasn't anything concrete that we could claim honestly.  The big 
item along these lines has been ntk's suggestion about carbon 
offsetting, which proved to be very contentious on this mailing list. 
Presenting the co-op as favoring such suggestions as a group wouldn't be 
accurate.

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?

With all the kinds of hosting available out there today, it's hard to 
generalize, but I can tell you where we stand.  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.

It's important to understand that we offer services way beyond what any 
mainstream provider goes to the trouble of providing.  "In the wild," 
you mostly find either "shared hosting" services, which have a few of 
the most popular dynamic web site and e-mail tools installed and are 
loathe to support more; or dedicated server, colocation, and VPS 
services, which require the customer to take on a serious amount of 
system administration work when he may just want the freedom to run a 
single simple dynamic web site using his favorite tools.  HCoop is 
focused on providing whatever the members want at a level significant 
enough to be backed up by majority voting.  We don't look for chances to 
make a buck by marking up our real expenses in offering new features, 
but rather we pass on costs exactly as we're billed for them.  This 
means that "support" and reliability are both much more complicated 
tasks for us than for your average hosting provider that only has to 
deal with a few variants of "cookie cutter web hosting."

Nonetheless, 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 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.  In fact, the answers to these interview questions are 
coming to you by way of discussion among the members on one of our 
mailing lists, not out of a public relations department. :)

As far as other concrete examples of community, 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 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 scheme
where members can make voluntary 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. 
This still includes the ability to run any kind of services you like 
that don't pose security risks or monopolize hardware resources; and 
services in the latter class are possible at extra cost based on our 
actual expenses in supporting them.

In this new set-up, we expect to charge market rates for disk and 
bandwidth usage.  That is, we won't charge more for these commodities 
than we pay for them from upstream providers, as I'm sure commercial 
providers are tempted to do, just because they can get away with it. 
This means that you won't need to pay more for, for example, hard disk 
usage than you would pay to buy your own disks at today's cheap storage 
prices.  In fact, it should cost less, since we can buy in bulk.

In further answer to your question about server architecture, we are 
strictly a Debian 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? :-)

First, 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 answers for future visitors' 
benefit!

Some useful quick factoids for introducing HCoop, also found on our web 
site: We've been around in some form or other since 2002, and we have 
110 members at the time I'm writing this, the majority having found us 
through word of mouth.

At present, we focus our efforts on supporting members who have good 
knowledge of UNIX-style environments and the workings of the Internet. 
We hope to move a good portion of our attentions to features aimed at a 
broader audience within the next year.  All the same, we do have some 
members now who don't fit the description I gave but report that they're 
  quite happy with our services and support.

> 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.