Various quandries in how we pay for all this cool stuff

1. One-time costs

If you are willing to chip in towards the $3102 in one-time costs that we are pondering now for our new hosting set-up, either through a donation, a loan/bond, or some other scheme of your own devising, then please record here your name and the details of your offer.

• AdamChlipala is willing to make a donation towards this if a few other people agree to split the costs evenly. He'd also probably waive his right to interest payments if a bond-based scheme ends up being the clear winner.

• FrankBynum is willing to make a donation as well, though would prefer to defer his payment until the end of August when his student loans come through. He could pay now if necessary, though. He would similarly waive interest payments, and is intrigued by the bond setup if there is enough support for it.

• ShaunEmpie is a fan of the bond scheme, but will also go with a no interest loan if the bond idea does not fly. The amount of the loan is TBD.

• JeffreyDrake is willing to make a short term loan of upto $100 cdn after the summer is over, if it could be used as a credit against hosting services.

• AndreKuehne is willing to make a donation of $50.

• NathanKennedy is willing to indefinitely keep his ~$450 balance already on deposit with the co-op, and make an additional $240 interest-free loan, to be paid back into his account in 24 monthly installments of $10. Additionally, he is willing to donate the first year of renewable energy credits, suggesting CoolWatts from NativeEnergy—i.e. the co-op would sign up to have the funds debited from its checking account, and for the first year for this to be debited in turn from ntk's balance.

• TanveerSingh is willing to put in 200$ as an interest free loan, paid back over 20 months. This loan may be adjusted in his monthly payments to the coop if so desired

• JeffreyDrake is additionally concerned about the idea of the cooperative getting into this much debt. The current funds are dictated by what the members put in. The members put in based on service costs. I can see this being a problem for payback later on, possibly even if it is by paying back in service credits (the money still has to come from somewhere and it is starting to appear like there will be quite a few members being creditors).

2. Monthly costs

If you are not willing to pay $13.44 per month for a few months, then please record your name here and how much you are willing to pay.

• JeffreyDrake is not willing to pay a combined total of over $12.00. Current and future plans involve very minimal use of resources and costs cannot be justified. This position might change as more plans are revealed.

  • NathanKennedy suggests offering an opt-in alternative plan at a flat rate of $5 per month to members whose resource usage is in the bottom quintile. At his current level JeffreyDrake would qualify. For the future members who do not qualify or opt in would evenly split remaining costs. Opting-in members would be responsible for keeping their disk/bandwidth/memory/CPU usage low, and would also likely need to have stricter quotas and ulimits set.

    • TanveerSingh thinks this may not work as we still do not have a reliable quota system. Sure we have web stats but things like ftp/ssh etc., are not really logged properly and we currently do not have the required infrastructure(software) to do so. Admins may correct me if I am wrong

    • I was thinking of using a semihonor system to enforce this. It's fairly obvious who the heavier users are, and it is unlikely that someone near the bottom of disk/web usage is going to be using sneaky methods to waste HCOOP's resources in other ways. If it became a problem we could revisit this. --NathanKennedy

      • As current bleed on funds is just over $3 per month, an additional $5 per month would be very economical for me. -- JeffreyDrake

      • As someone who uses 1% of total bandwidth used on avg (from last 3 months stats) and 1% of the largest disk user (so percent to total would be miniscule) and whose CPU usage is unknown, but whose budget for hosting from donations to support my site is approx $5 (each user donates $6 to "sponsor" that particular month) , this new amount, even if temporary, would force me to leave and look for other hosting that is within my expense limitations. And I understand that we are not using all of the bandwidth we are presently getting, so my percent of that would be even less. --Hallgren/chatmroomcc