[pentupentropy]

OK, this is not a business idea, granted, but... the only company I know who currently offers a co-op style host is rackspace.com, and I don't know if the rollout occured yet or if it's still in beta, but if people tried it, and it worked out to everyone's betterment, it could develop into a busienss for the originators....


I don't know how familiar you guys are with hosting, but as a sys admin for one of the (at that time) largest webhosting companies, I've seen what it takes to run an enterprise site.

MySQL is now clusterable, linux is, and equipment is expensive. Why not start a cluster co-op? rack4less and/or hurricane electric offer good deals on rackspace/bandwidth, but only for certain setups. IE - you can get a full rack with a 25 Mb (megabit, not megabyte - ask me if you need clarity) connection and like 15 amps of power for $1200/mo.

A good database cluster and web server cluster as well as shared mail servers, etc, would be awesome if split up the right way.

say you have 25 clients with 200 websites. Those websites could most likely fit on 1 box with the right specs (content). You distribute that over 3-5 load balanced servers, a HUGE quad proc Itanium or Sun Micro DB server with tremendous HDD space (NAS/SAN). Everyone saves money on firewalls, load balancing, bandwidth, etc.. yet everyone maintains the utmost reliability and performance. After the initial cost of the equipment (120-150K), 25 people are paying $48/mo for unlimited HDD space and a what would cost you $2500/mo or so elsewhere.

If you think I'm exaggerating, look up the following:

1 Mb/s connection (burstable to 25 with NO overage charge)
5 way web (http) load balancing
Good firewall, unlimited rules
basically unlimited space (obviously it's limited, but definitely 100x more scalable than what's available)
database on separate box (in fact, go to servers.aplus.net and see what a quad proc machine costs... $3k/mo! and that's with something like 36 GB)
mail server/list server on separate box
DNS on separate box


all this stuff would cost you well over $10k/mo, and you would only ever use a part of the resources because of the way applications and websites work.

just another idea =)

BTW... 25 people would be $6k setup right? aplus charges 5K setup just for that quad proc server they lease and with this you would own part of the equipment