You're looking at J-Colo, the coolest, smartest, frummest colocated server operation in Hendon. It's a members-only service - to be a member, you have to be a friend of ours (or a friend of a friend) and pay a small annual fee (which gets ploughed into the colo fund - see below). Being a paid-up J-Colo member means you get access to some or all of these:
Services are available for both non-profit organisations and businesses, at various rates.
Let's go through them one by one:
Fundamentally, this means that members are not customers - it's not a simple "pay your money and get your service and that's the end of it" deal. At least, it's not that way in principle. In practice, it will be that way the vast majority of the time, because everyone prefers things to be simple, including us. However, we may occasionally ask you to invest some of your time or other resources to help the co-operative out, just as we (the admins) do. (More on this later.)
We don't make a profit from the membership fees; All the money goes straight back into the colo fund. This fund pays for the annual hosting fee with Mailbox Internet (the lovely people who give the J-Colo servers an Internet connection and a place to live, in London's fashionable Fulham) as well as hardware costs and anything else J-Colo needs to keep running. However, the three J-Colo admins (namely Dan, Richard and Yoz) don't see a penny of it.
Service is what the J-colo fund is put towards: a formal contract for Internet service with Mailbox, and essential bits of hardware. Support is the effort the admins put into accomodating your needs. We, the admins, don't get paid, so when asking for help, please bear this in mind. Of course, we're not saying you shouldn't ask for help; if you need it, please do. In fact, we'll be putting things like web-based request trackers in place to make asking for things easy. However, please understand that if we don't respond to a request immediately, it may be because our actual paying jobs, which we still have to do, come first. We'll try and get all requests dealt with in a reasonable amount of time, but please don't get too uppity if we can't (or if your definition of "reasonable" isn't the same as ours).
However, it's worth bearing in mind that, as a member of the J-colo co-operative, you are also part of the support. This does not mean that you have to start learning about Apache configuration. What it means is that we want you to share your knowledge of J-colo's workings, as you come across them, with other members. The most obvious path to doing this is writing documentation. As an example, suppose you suddenly decide that you want your website to have Frobnitzes on it. You ask us about it, and we tell you that you can do that with Speeblydoo, which we have installed - you just need to configure it a certain way. Ideally, you'll go off to the Internet and read up on how to configure it. However, you may find it all confusing, in which case we'll try and help. By the end of it, you should have a reasonable idea of how to configure Speeblydoo to deliver Frobnitzes. Since other J-colo users may also want to deliver Frobnitzes, it'd be really really helpful if you could write a How-To document for the J-colo website - that way, people can read that instead of bothering us, and making us send them to you, and then bothering you. You see?
We started J-colo so that all of our friends who come to us needing Internet hosting (and we get quite a few) have an easy, affordable solution they can trust. We try and be as helpful as we can - if you want something extra, we'll do it for you if it's easy. We won't just turn you down for the sake of it, because we know how frustrating that is.
The co-operative aspect of J-colo means that members should help, not hinder each other. This refers to the support aspect mentioned above, but also to not doing anything with the service that might cause problems with anyone else's usage. Because of the flexible, co-operative nature of J-Colo, we haven't completely locked it down from the inside, so you've got much more flexibility than you would with most other hosting accounts. Please, if you're going to be a member, then do everyone a favour and avoid all of the following:
The fundamental rule to bear in mind is:
If in doubt, ask the admins.
Many people, organisations and businesses rely on J-colo for very important things. It is vital to livelihoods. Don't screw it up.
This page last edited by Yoz, on 23rd January 2002 at too-damn-late AM.