Previously I had advocated on the wiki and the list having a two-tiered (or possibly, three-tiered) pricing scheme when we move to our new hosting setup. This is because a few of our members don't want or can't afford to pay the higher rate and at the same time have extremely low usage levels such that they cannot justify these costs. A handful of our members consume most of the bandwidth and disk space usage, a large group falls in the middle with moderate usage, and a small group uses practically no resources.
My idea is to offer those in the last group a flat rate of $5 per month as long as they keep usage low. To qualify for that rate they would probably have to have their disk quota set low (about 50M) and use minimal web bandwidth, as little as 15M per month, and should also have email forwarded with no IMAP or Squirrelmail access. Examining disk usage and bandwidth usage for the past few months shows that it would be fair to offer this rate to ten members: naren, ankur, basavesh, kokain, frayedthread, jdrake, ochipepe, ray, euclid, vikas Dues for the other members could either be done the same way by deducting flat dues from monthly expenses and splitting them evenly, or moving to a flat rate where monthly dues are set somewhat above projected expenses in order retain cash for future expansions. It may or may not make sense for members with top usage to chip in a double share or some other additional amount for their outsized usage, although we will have plenty of excess capacity for the time being. I would like people's comments on this plan. Obviously this is only a proposal at this point, but I would like to get this settled shortly so that we don't have uncertainty hanging over member's heads. Also let me know if and why you think the list I composed is not proper. Obviously though the cutoff must be low, or we would be offering the discount rate to most of our members and there would be no way for the co-op to meet its expenses. -ntk _______________________________________________ HCoop-Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://hcoop.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hcoop-discuss
