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

[Daniel Margolis]

You're right on the AFS and custom daemon stuff. I kind of swept that aside
with the reference to power users, but I agree that without a full VPS or
similar, you're probably not going to get that.

That said, a VPS still allows us to save on hardware costs, potentially. I
really haven't looked at the pricing of this sort of thing for a while, so I
can't say. My main point was that we should try to keep in mind what we can
do better and what we can't. We probably can't do lower overheads, even with
volunteers. We can do more equitable/fractional purchasing and power user
features.

We can also do ideology, as you hint at. If some users believe in the idea
and want to pay more, that's cool, too. It's not something I want to have to
count on.

You're right that a VPS doesn't allow us to save all the staff costs. It
does allow us to save the costs of hardware maintenance.

Ultimately, the needs of those of us who just want cheap low-resource
hosting may be best satisfied by a different arrangement than one which
satisfies the needs of those who want power user features and a democratic
organization. For the time being, HCoop is one of the best bargains for
both. I think we can continue to satisfy both, but that requires, as I said
above, keeping in mind what we do better and what we don't.

If I wanted to get an idea of the current cost of hardware and hardware
maintenance, where would I start looking?


On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Adam Chlipala <adamc at hcoop.net> wrote:

> Daniel Margolis wrote:
> > 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.
> >
>
> Does anyone else let members build and run whatever daemons they want,
> using whatever programming languages and development tools they want?
> Does anyone else offer AFS?  These are two that pop out at me as likely
> differentiators from any competitors at any price levels.  Both are
> probably bad ideas profit-wise, such that only a non-profit organization
> would work to provide them.
>
> I also like the democratic nature of HCoop, which frees members from
> having to worry about whether the business owners are trying to take
> advantage of them.  I have a feeling that a significant fraction of
> HCoop members feel the same way.
>
> > 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.
> >
>
> Maybe so.  I think we need staff with particular formal time commitments
> to offer a good service even built on top of VPSes, though.
>
> > 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.
>
> I'm not so sure that this needs to leak out into dues levels.  We can
> continue allowing some members to pledge more.  I think there are enough
> people out there ready to Believe In an organization like ours to offset
> costs for very price-sensitive members to points where we continue
> beating Dreamhost rates.  We might need a period of additional member
> base growth first, though.
>
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