RFC: Web Hosting Co-Op

[stu42j]

I reluctantly signed up with Aletia about two months ago and kept telling myself "you get what you pay for" whenever I had problems. Recently, I became frustrated about the inability to run scripts as user under multi-hosted domains and was told that I could move to a new server that would have SuExec enabled. I knew that this would be a hassle but figured that it would be worth it in the long run. Unfortunately, Laura Brandt, the support person put in charge of my move, made the transition way more inconvenient than it really needed to be.

I can forgive things like ticket systems going down but when members of your support staff are either lazy, incompetent or inconsiderate (or some combination thereof) that's just too much.

The main problem is that I haven't found anywhere else that I could get all the features I needed for a price that I wanted to pay. I've also never really liked working within the restrictions of a virtual hosted environment.

So, I was thinking about starting my own web hosting business but it just seems like it would be too hard to make a profit. Then it hit me, why bother trying to make a profit!

So, after that long introduction, here's my idea: A web hosting co-op. We would get a dedicated server and all members would equally share the resources and the cost. As well as voting on decisions concerning how the co-op is run.

I'm estimating $100-200 /month and 10-20 members could easily make it competively priced and still get good performance.

So what do other people think?


Stuart Johnston
saj@utdallas.edu

[timechange]

Only problem is, when you get a dedicated server you need to have someone supervising it all and offering assistance/support. Are you saying that all 20 participants of the equal co-operative will be logging in as root to manage their accounts etc?

I am not saying it's a bad idea, it's just a bit utopic

[stu42j]

You are totally right about that. I meant to mention this is my first post...

My thinking is that probably one person (me would have root access and there would also be a small group of qualified/verified admins that would have a higher level of access but not quite root. We would probably setup some sort of control panel for general user changes. I'm not exactly sure yet how all this would work out.

There definetely would be disadvantages to this co-op system - and this issue that you mentioned is one of them - but I think that the advantages would more than make up for it.

The more I think about this, the more excited I get. I can't get to sleep!!!

[timechange]

Mutiny! Mutiny!