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

[Clinton Ebadi]

Daniel Margolis <dan at af0.net> writes:

> 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).

Dreamhost massively oversells capacity--as do all shared hosting
providers. They can sell you a seemingly absurd amount of disk space and
bandwidth for next to nothing because a significant portion of their
userbase does next to nothing with their accounts.

You also do not get a shell account and afs space as Adam pointed
out. HCoop is nice--you can run your own daemons (e.g. I run small web
application written in Common Lisp sitting behind mod_proxy for
flagrantpork) *without* having to maintain your own UNIX system as with
a VPS. This is worth quite a bit more than $5/month.

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