Hosting expenses - I made a mistake!
Noah
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For some time now, I've been paying our hosting bills from Hetzner and getting reimbursed through OpenCollective. This is totally fine and not what the thread is about (though I do think long-term the organization ought to be looking for a way to pay these bills directly). Additionally, while I was involved in maintaining our infrastructure through the Tech Working Group, at some point around April 2022 the need arose to put money down for the service that manages our email (e.g. new registration applications), and for someone to take up paying for media hosting at DigitalOcean. At the time these costs were very small, and I didn't mind making a trivial, additional informal contribution to the co-op.
Then, I completely forgot about those things for a while. In the meantime my financial situation has changed a bit, and the cost of hosting our media on DigitalOcean has risen. In this time period (roughly a year and a half) we've spent about $36 on Mailgun, and nearly $600 on DigitalOcean.
Now, I'm looking at these charges and thinking it would be pretty great to get reimbursed, but I'm a little uncomfortable asking for that given my inconsistency and lack of communication, and the length of time involved -- I don't want to seem like I'm taking advantage.
So, first of all I'm sorry for accidentally removing visibility into our hosting costs. Secondly, would it be possible to get reimbursed for these payments? And if so, thirdly, how would y'all prefer I submit the reimbursements in OpenCollective?
Nathan Schneider Thu 30 Nov 2023 5:00PM
@Graham Good question. I know we use WebArchitects for git hosting, but I think their web hosting costs were too high (and perhaps rely on Hetzner anyway).
Andrew Escobar (Andres) · social.coop Finance Working Group Mon 4 Dec 2023 4:09AM
@Noah Also suggest/support setting up bank transfers, which speeds up payments for you, lowers fees for social.coop, and lowers friction for our fiscal host (P6/innovation.coop): https://docs.opencollective.com/help/expenses-and-getting-paid/expenses
Noah Wed 13 Dec 2023 10:53PM
@graham2 I agree that in theory cooperative hosting would be nice, and when I was more involved in running the infrastructure I did some research into the available options. Unfortunately, cooperative hosting is dramatically more expensive than corporate offerings for a service of even our modest scale. Of course, we could afford to make that choice, if someone wanted to drive that process through Loomio.
Graham Thu 14 Dec 2023 9:24AM
@Noah Thanks for getting back on this side point, that's appreciated. Yes, I agree that this is steep price differential is currently the case. I'm working with a group that is looking to address that, so watch this space.
Nathan Schneider Thu 30 Nov 2023 5:01PM
Thanks for this, @Noah. Yes, please do submit these expenses and receipts to Open Collective for reimbursement.
Could you explain the situation for why we're using DigitalOcean in addition to Hetzner? Could we consolidate our hosting costs?
Andrew Escobar (Andres) · social.coop Finance Working Group Mon 4 Dec 2023 4:28AM
@Noah Our social.coop has the financial resources to reimburse these expenses. I encourage you to submit as this situation is totally understandable. Much has changed over the past year with social.coop and federated social networks!
@Nathan Schneider I will leave it to Noah and the TWG to verify or chime in, but it is common to separate compute and content delivery. I suspect it is not worth the TWG time to consolidate or migrate.
Andrew Escobar (Andres) · social.coop Finance Working Group Mon 4 Dec 2023 5:46AM
I do think long-term the organization ought to be looking for a way to pay these bills directly.
Agree! We should aim to make these routine expenses as easy to pay/reimburse as possible.
The virtual credit cards offered by Open Collective are not an option though. 1.) DigitalOcean and many other hosting/compute/distribution providers simply do not accept them. 2.) Open Collective will only issue virtual cards to the employees of collectives; social.coop has none.
We likely need to wait until the new vendors feature launches, which allows expenses to be submitted on behalf of vendors. This vendors feature currently requires preview features to be active and will require approval from our fiscal host (P6/innovation.coop). @Graham, please take a look!
Graham · Thu 30 Nov 2023 9:06AM
Hi Noah, Graham here from Platform 6 /innovation.coop - running the fiscal hosting for social dot coop. Apologies for hijacking your post, but it put two thoughts in my head:
Using this opportunity to say hi and ask if it is an option for you to make claims on Open Collective via a bank payment rather than Paypal. Not a major issue, but if workable it would make things a tiny bit smoother from our side, and probably a tiny bit cheaper for social dot coop, and likely a bit quicker in terms fo you getting reimbursed.
Again as an aside, I'd like social dot coop to think – perhaps in the medium to long term – about using/supporting cooperatively owned/run hosting infrastructure. There may not be many options there to look at, but I do know that this is a service offered by webarchitects.coop (although their options are significantly more costly than the big providers) and there may be others. For it's part innovation.coop is working on a plan to put together some modern hosting infrastructure in a data centre that is itself part of a cooperative. That won't materialise any time soon, but if successful cooperative projects like social dot coop can be supportive partners in such projects, they are much more likely to happen.