It sounds like you think we should become the sourceforge of webhosting. Everyone initially gets a generous allotment of space. Everyone is approved quite easily. 75% of the people dont even use 10% of their allotted resources while 5% has to make periodic requests for resource increases.
I'm more in favor of "From each according to his usage, to each according to his needs" One of the people I recruited for this place is probably using 3 megs of disk space and probably next to no bandwidth (forgot his name - he runs a retreat chalet in the New England area). Whereas I am pushing 10 gigs of disk space. And that does not count my MySQL usage which is going to skyrocket since I just installed Drupal. The spectrum of usage profiles is quite broad and it is not fair to treat everyone like a number and have other people paying for my disk space and bandwidth for me. Most non-profit cooperatives and most commericlal hosting situations have tiered membership levels: the more you pay and/or the more you help out, the more you get. Such a model is sustainable. Put yourself in the shoes of someone like the guy I recruited and ask if you feel like shelling out money on my behalf. You'd have to have above-average altruism or below-average business sense to buy into something like that. To summarize, I am completely in favor of quantifying resource usage in every way imaginable and rationing out expenses as a function of such usage. But I am also in favor of HCoop collecting 30-50% above the due amount (or demanding a fixed extra amount from all members) so that they have adequate cash buffer for whatever reasons, seen and unforseen. _______________________________________________ HCoop-Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://hcoop.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hcoop-discuss
