Note that the prices above are the prices we would charge an external client and the less used infrastructure (for example the 6 CPU / 8GB RAM / 173G disk Nextcloud server) hasn't been included. If this proposal passes I'm going to propose that Webarchitects start paying into the CoTech fund — we haven't done so in the past as we felt that our infrastructure contribution was as much as we could afford.

This sounds like a good idea, and I'm glad we're starting to recognise the cost of this.

Are we saying that this would be the cost of the infrastructure for the calendar year 2020? I think that would make sense and like Aaron says it might prompt us to reconsider some costs (discourse offer official hosting for $100/month for example)

Would it be possible to tack on something here Chris? I love the git.coop instance you host, and it's really useful. Can the cost for that somehow be included? And in addition if we're paying for that for all of CoTech could we whitelist all CoTech member domain names so that they can have git.coop accounts? At the moment, at hack days for example, a new contributer has to come and find you and join WebArchitects before they can push code - which is a bit more friction than I'd like.

I understand that the proposal above is for 2019 not 2020.

I don't know how much RAM the official hosting plan servers have, however if we wanted to be hosted by Discourse on corporate servers (all their services run behind Amazon Cloudfront) and still wanted to keep the plugins we have, then I'm not sure if any option would be suitable, as the Events and Map plugins are developed by an independent co-op, Pavillion and are not offered by the official hosting. In terms of disk space we are using 2.1G for root, 2.5G for /var/discourse and 5G for /var/lib/docker (60G of disk space is allocated to the server in total). For the last 30 days there were 2.1k page views and there are 8 staff accounts, overall I'd suggest that it isn't really possible to make a direct comparison.

The GitLab git.coop server has 20G of RAM (it did have a lot less and was incrementally increased until it was high enough to ensure that the nightly backup jobs didn't fail) and 420G of disk space and 8 CPUs and the GitLab runner server (this is used to update the CoTech web site for example) has 10G of RAM, 90G of disk space and 6 CPUs, our public VPS prices don't go up this high, but in any case I don't think it would be appropriate for CoTech to fund the cost of this, other CoTech co-ops like Outlandish and Agile have their own GitLab servers to pay for.

CoTech buying shares in Webarchitects and having all the member domains whitelisted does sound like a good idea but I think we would need to have a membership fee to join CoTech first?

Thanks Chris!

In general I think I'd feel slightly more comfortable paying for the infrastructure upfront so that we have an idea of the costs, but I think it makes sense to try and get you something for the hosting you've done so far.

It's a bit less interesting for me personally what the specifications of the machines etc. are - I think I'd rather pay WA / you for a combination of your time and the resources (I understand that things will be hosted on shared servers etc, but am happy to take your word for the costs), so perhaps a strategy for git.coop would for you to set a "per-repo" price or something?

Perhaps I should start another proposal for CoTech to buy membership in WA? I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean about membership fees.

The background to whitelisting of domains for account creation on git.coop being linked to membership shares of Webarchitects can be found on this Loomio thread, the suggested number of shares doesn't cover the cost of providing the service but we make a lot of use of it internally (it is used a lot by the Webarchitects workers, me especially) and allowing more people to have use of it helps share costs.

The server resources used is a bit of a side issue, but it is partly what we use to work our costs (in addition to time spent maintaining things) but note that GitLab, Discourse and Nextcloud (with all the add-ons) are very heavy on computing resources, the static CoTech site however is at the other end of the spectrum and uses hardly any 🙂.

That's great background Chris thank you! The problem I'm interested in solving is removing the friction for folks to contribute to shared code, so I'll have a think. Let's park this for now to keep this proposal on topic (sorry for dragging it off-topic everyone!). I'll have a chat with you in the new year and we can start a separate proposal if we can come up with a good solution.

Thank you for this discussion it provides a helpful background to the topic.

Perhaps at the coming gathering we can go over all the services that WA has been providing (and what they could provide) and how CoTech should address this in a forward-looking way.

Regarding git.coop I think it might make sense to set up another vote for CoTech becoming member of WA. One of the questions would be how many shares should we buy to whitelist all the coops in the network?

Could you reopen voting? Only one person voted maybe because its xmas 🙂