[HCoop-Discuss] Ideas for new physical hosting and personnel arrangements

[Adam Chlipala]

At the last HCoop board meeting, the board seemed overall enthusiastic 
about the idea of redoing our physical arrangements from the ground up.  
The basic idea is to identify a locale with all of these properties:
1) Low cost of living
2) At least one quality colocation site (hopefully with relatively low cost)
3) A good supply of qualified people who would be interested in working 
as HCoop sysadmins part-time for pay

All of this would almost certainly come with increases in HCoop 
membership dues.  We have long been divided between people who see HCoop 
chiefly as about "cheap hosting" and people who see it more as about 
being in control of their hosting environments and having access to 
cutting-edge services (like AFS and dynamic web sites implemented in 
unusual programming languages) that commercial players might not see as 
profitable.  In the end, the voting of our membership base will decide 
which way we will go, but I have a feeling that the co-op will lose its 
most active volunteers if we veer towards cheapness-at-all-costs in 
official policy.  I, for one, am running out of patience with our 
current low ability to handle emergencies quickly and to expand our 
hardware base easily to handle growing load.

So, I'm starting this thread to ask for suggestions on how we could go 
about redoing things hardware-wise from scratch.  I suspect our work on 
AFS and other software-y distribution issues is far from wasted, and 
that we would be able to copy our current software set-up onto new 
hardware without much trouble.