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

[Adam Chlipala]

Daniel Margolis wrote:
> So your claim is that our overhead costs are over 55 times those of 
> Amazon? (Peer1 costs are fixed overhead rather than per unit with 
> respect to bandwidth, CPU, and disk usage.)

Since we're providing our own servers, Peer 1 costs are independent of 
CPU or disk usage.  We also have their cheapest bandwidth plan, I think, 
which we don't come close to saturating.  Thus, taking our current 
hosting plan as fixed, there's very little justification for linking 
shares of Peer 1 costs to member resource usage.  We're paying for space 
that could be used to host much more expensive and powerful hardware, 
but instead we're filling it with low-powered donated machines.  In 
essence, we're seriously underutilizing the resources Peer 1 is giving 
us, but we're saving on our own non-monthly hardware costs by doing so.  
We couldn't do very much better with another colo provider, since slow 
servers can take up as much space as fast servers.

Again, I won't dispute that this leaves us with high fixed overhead, and 
I'm starting to feel more amenable to switching to some virtualized 
solution, but I _don't_ believe that it makes sense to say that members 
using low amounts of bandwidth, CPU, or disk "obviously deserve" to pay 
less of Peer 1 costs than members with high usage, as long as we don't 
come close to overgrowing what can fit in our quarter cabinet.