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 may be 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).

  • How is this so much debt? We already have over $2000 in cash. It looks like we will be financing at most $1500 in member loans. Even at our current size that is only $22 per person! The idea is that more members will join after the migration, at least twice as many, hopefully we will triple our size before too long. Which would make it about $7.50 per person, paid back over about two years. I think financing through loans, especially cheap or free loans from members which are a much better deal than we could get in the open market, is more responsible, sustainable and sensible than billing the co-op outright at this point. Would you really prefer being billed $47 right now? --NathanKennedy

• MichaelOlson is willing to donate a yet-undetermined amount (not exceeding $400) for the one-time costs when our purchasing plans are finalized.

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

        • Your stats are somewhat disingenuous. You have been consistently been one of the top bandwidth users of late==so far this month number 2 out of 67, after clinton. Likewise your disk usage is not high but it is just a bit below the median. It would make sense to charge extra to those members who are using disproportionate resources, e.g. clinton and a few others on bandwidth and terry and a few others on disk space, but it is debatable whether this is actually a good idea when we are so far from being saturated and the difference is a single order of magnitude. But while I am certainly willing to look for ways to keep your costs low, you certainly aren't using below-average server resources. --NathanKennedy

        • I'll be the first to agree that for current month thus far, my bandwidth is high. I was looking at prior months and comparing it to overall total used. I'm also under the impression that we are not using anywhere near the bandwidth that we are presently under contract for. So how do we account for all the unused capacity? I'll never need that much capacity. If HCoop gets billed for , let's say for example, 10 times the bandwidth we now use, should I as one who doesn't need/want that resource be billed based on that? That was my point. -- Hallgren

        • You can't just say you're using 1% of the co-op's total bandwidth. First of all, a lot of that bandwidth is used by HCoop's websites and is not allocated to any individual user at all, and moreover we have 67 members. You are using several times the median bandwidth per member. And yes, we do have a free terabyte of bandwidth monthly at Interserver, that we are now only using a fraction of. But it's not as if you can just say you are being overcharging. At Xiolink, we didn't have free bandwidth and we were paying per gig, through the nose--more than we are paying at Interserver. And we need to have room to expand--even discounting new members, our bandwidth usage has been steadily rising. We have a contract for bandwidth for the mutual benefit of all our members, you are not the only one paying for this "wasted" bandwidth. If all goes well, as new members join costs per member will steadily drop from $13/month back to the under $5/member where it is now, but with vastly greater resources, network, and overall value to each member within our expanded infrastructure. I hope we can arrange a situation where you can afford dues through that point, but in order to get there we have to be equitable to all members. -- NathanKennedy