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

[David Snider]

I wasn't pointing fingers at the people taking advantage of the subsidy. I
am criticizing the policy of subsidizing people because it makes things
inflexible and ultimately creates an unequal distribution of power.

On Fri, 8 May 2009 10:17:29 -0700, Daniel Margolis <dan at af0.net> wrote:
> I have no problems with the current arrangement, in which fixed operating
> expenses aren't distributed based on resource consumption. But if we're
> gong
> to start talking about who's subsidizing whom, then it seems to me that
> the
> only equitable arrangement is to divvy it up based solely on usage.
> 
> Or we could just drop the issue and not point fingers at other people as
> being freeloaders. That's my preference.
> 
> I'm not sure why I'm even arguing with you, because you didn't say
> anything
> about subsidies.
> 
> Slightly unrelated: this company Slicehost (now owned by Rackspace) look
> interesting. Xen-based virtualization. Kind of cool. Hmm.
> On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 10:00 AM, Adam Chlipala <adamc at hcoop.net> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> HCoop-Discuss mailing list
>> HCoop-Discuss at lists.hcoop.net
>> https://lists.hcoop.net/listinfo/hcoop-discuss
>>