[HCoop-Discuss] On organizing people to get work done

[Daniel Margolis]

Why should/do people choose HCoop over, say, Dreamhost? For me, it's 
mostly about price--most hosting services that offer the featureset 
HCoop offers also offer far more resources (bandwidth and disk space) 
than I need and, hence, cost significantly more.

That doesn't mean that those commercial services don't offer an 
equivalent or lower unit cost than we do--especially if we are to take 
on paid employees (as we ought to to have comparable service), we should 
assume that the operating expenses of someone like Dreamhost are 
significantly lower (no?).

So at least from my perspective, I think the economic advantage of HCoop 
is that by purchasing in bulk (essentially), we allow individual users 
to buy in very small purchases (i.e., I can get a hundred megs of disk 
and similar amounts of bandwidth for a $3 a month, rather than 500GB of 
storage at Dreamhost for $10/month--notice that Dreamhost's unit costs 
are still lower, though).

Given that argument (which might be faulty?), a VPS or similar 
arrangement might allow us to preserve our big economic advantage 
(allowing individual members to buy smaller shares at bulk rates) 
without having to compete with very large commercial providers on 
maintaining low overheads.

I agree with you, Adam, that we can't maintain an equivalent level of 
service solely with volunteer staff, but it seems unlikely to me that 
we're going to have operating expenses that are as low as large 
for-profit competitors', either. Our biggest selling points are offering 
power-user features and allowing collective purchasing.

(In fact, I'd be cool with just buying the cheapest Dreamhost 
offering--which isn't even a VPS--and splitting it with a few other 
people.)

That argument aside, I think paid staff is itself a good idea (assuming 
HCoop continues to operate in the current manner), and that we should, 
as you intimated in your original email, formally define an SLA for 
member service response time, bug fix turnaround, software version 
updating, and new infrastructure projects. If we are to pay for 
non-volunteer services, we should be clear what we expect to get back.

On 5/7/2009 12:21 PM, Adam Chlipala wrote:
> David Snider wrote:
>> What are people's feelings about buying into a few Virtual Private Servers
>> rather than having our own dedicated hardware? You'd think the more
>> fine-grained scalability of this type of setup along with not having to
>> worry about 'one-time-costs' that we've had in the past would benefit an
>> organization like ours.
>>
>
> I see that as a short-term solution only.  In the long run, it will cost
> more to use VPSes than our own servers, if we manage to grow the
> membership base as I hope we do.  It's been suggested many times that we
> offer our own VPS service, and I think that's a great idea, once we get
> our staffing and physical hosting situations into shape to implement it.
>
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