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Comments
@sysnode: Love the idea but I don't think it'll work out unless ppl are willing to make a commitment. There's no way to survive if it's on a month-to-month basis, and always scrambling to find someone to take over another person's spot.
Are you saying something like this:
a group of people creates a budget, let's say 10 persons 5 USD/person = 50 USD then the "group leader" buy a server and create VPS for every contributor? Something like this?
@sysnode was thinking about that myself.
Just checked ovh for fun
about 160 euro/month
you get
32 gb ram
2 x 2TB in RAID 1(hardware)
20 TB @ 1 gbps, 10 mbps thereafter
AMD Opteron 4174 6x 2.30+ GHz
about 1.2 euro/IP one time
So 32 guys in the cooperative -> KVM ->1gb ram, 60gb space, 600 gb bandwidth. For 5 euro/month + 1.2/IP onetime + some additional time for self support
handling financials will be a problem maybe.
put 32 guys to keep the budget in LEB range! hahaha
Edit:
A workable idea would be, 4 guys sharing it at 40/m with atleast a years mutual commitment and each splitting their resources as per need into multiple vms for self, friends etc
That is one of the problems, the monthly price can be highly unstable lol
Instead of running your own server for a group, could a group make a one-year commitment and ask the provider to put only your group on a server?
This may not save a lot of money, but it would foster a "good neighbor" policy which might minimize server bandwidth/downtime problems created by spammers, warez sites, IRC servers, etc.
Any providers out there open to this idea? If so, how many users would you need, and what specs/price would each VPS have?
and with 32 guys on a RAID1.. don't expect great I/O.
it would be more interesting to share a small kimsufi amond 2 people
@tortau Good point re month to month, however if people 1. get extra value from the arrangement + make bi/annual commitment, why not?
@divya An interesting calculation. 32 people sounds a lot to handle indeed.. What if not all were to pay 5euros? I guess some might be into getting some more ram, space etc., which could mean a bit less than 32..
I guess, reading some of the comments, it kind of boils down to trust. Would you trust a bunch of other people that, perhaps a bit like you, fancy having a bit of server fun - or someone that wants to exploit your want and get money.
Sure, not all providers are primarily exploiters, but fact is that they are not easily found..
@sysnode Yeah, it boils down to a matter of trust. I mean seriously, even we got everyone to sign a contract to commit for x months, there's no telling ppl won't disappear either. Not unless it's one of those down payment thing, and well, who's to say the "main guy" won't take the money and disappear![:\](https://lowendtalk.com/resources/emoji/confused.png ":\")
@tortau well.. the point of a collective is that there isn't a "main guy".. ok, one of the points..
Yes, but in a sense, you need one main guy to handle payments to the datacentre. One guy to set up the server in order to create VMs ...
Seems, people are getting serious on this!
Guys, seriously speaking, I can get you a fully workable SOP(standard operating procedure) document within a couple of days and could throw in some admin time and personal experience to startup and get things going. But ...
Is there really a reason to go for it(?) when there are nice people like Tim, Fran and the likes, taking care of the dirty(read troublesome) work for us and giving us nice slices and a pleasant sleep at night.
I'll be IN for the same reasons I hang out here and purchase couple of LEBs with no use for them. i.e just for fun!
interesting.. so who is in ?
about 160 euro/month
you get
32 gb ram
2 x 2TB in RAID 1(hardware)
20 TB @ 1 gbps, 10 mbps thereafter
AMD Opteron 4174 6x 2.30+ GHz
about 1.2 euro/IP one time
It's an interesting idea but the costs will be a bit on the high side and possibly even higher than if you were to just get a KVM from a provider.
The CPU/bandwidth would handle 32 clients.
As with VPS providers, disk I/O would be the big issue. There are some additional things involved:
1) Those 2TB drives aren't that fast to begin with...maybe 65MB/s? Disk IO on a RAID1 on a (probably) 5400 RPM drive would not be very good once split between 32 people. A real provider could give you 300MB/s disk I/O while you would be pushing something like 30MB/s depending on the users.
2) You would need to leave some room for KVM overhead so you can cut it down from 32 people to 30. Then if you do a VPS Control panel, you have to dedicate 1 KVM VPS for it so you're down to 29 VPS.
3) There's also the cost of a Control Panel like SolusVM that would have to be added. You would need 2 licenses for CP + Slave. You would have to first create 1 VPS for the SolusVM Master control. Then from there SolusVM can create the next 29 VPS.
4) If you don't want to add the cost of a VPS panel, you'll have to get 1 main guy that can reboot VPS servers and create the KVM VPS containers.
I'm guessing a provider can give you better performance at a lower cost than doing it by yourself.
There is also HyperVM and another very good control panel is OpenVZ Web Panel however they doesn't support KVM
but for OpenVZ they're good.
Another solution would be to buy a machine, that way you could have a RAID 10, even SSD cache & montlhy colo cost can be quite low.
HyperVM is good for a free solution to cut costs but as you said, doesn't support KVM.
HyperVM does run Xen too. That's a good choice if the co-op decides to use OpenVZ or Xen.
But if the co-op decides to use OpenVZ, there are quite a few providers that would be able to undercut those costs. There are alot of OpenVZ providers out there that would probably give you 1 Gig of RAM for $7 or less.
KVM is much more expensive to run and will consume more hardware resources than OpenVZ. This is why you don't see any 1GB KVM LEB offers but have two 2GB OpenVZ LEB's and quite a few 1GB OpenVZ's.
ISPConfig 3.0.4 have VServer menu for OpenVZ.. man!! i should try this one (ISPConfig lovers :P)
@kiloserve the calculations were done very lightly and just to give an idea. I myself suggested going with a provider to be a better option
Having said that, there will be n number of options similar to what bobinfo mentioned. And control panel is not a necessity imho.
If it is a group of trustworthy people and if you can stick to Linux, OpenVZ is a better choice compared to KVM.
@kiloserve at al, interesting calculations. If we stick with the real-life illuminations you provided, am straggling to see what is the operating cost difference between a coop and a company that got themselves a server and has to divide it between 29 accounts or so.
Perhaps am missing something?
Another point is that am not sure why each coop member should have one $7 account. Personally, I'd be very happy paying for a slightly larger share, say $21-28, knowing the server is pretty sound.
Regarding the one person collecting + paying and might do runner. I think there are a fair few ways to limit that possibility. It could be an idea to look at how, for example, the london hacker space handles money..
I think the difference is in the quality of the VPS. Most importantly disk I/O.
For the same price as the co-op, you can get a much faster disk with a provider than you would get splitting between 30 people on a RAID1.
For example, a VPS company might use up to 16x SAS 15,000 RPM drives in RAID10.
For a low cost 32GB RAM server, you would probably get 2x 5400 RPM SATA (or 2x7200 RPM) in RAID1
However, if disk I/O is not important than it could be perfectly fine. I guess it depends on the use.