We are an Internet hosting service and community, run democratically as a USA 501(c)12 non-profit corporation. HCoop members pool their resources to support most any services that qualify as "Internet hosting."
# We are a democratic organization. Every year, the members elect a Board of Directors from among themselves. These directors determine policy issues by voting on them. We also make an effort to decide as much as possible through open discussion by the members, though codifying this in our bylaws would make decision-making too slow.
# Our infrastructure is designed for "power users." You can configure the behavior of your domains and sites in shared daemons without needing to request anything from a superuser. You can write and run your own daemons in whatever programming language you fancy.
# We take security seriously. To make sure the above freedoms don't cause trouble, we take care to prevent members from stepping on each other's toes. We've developed custom interfaces to shared daemons that run sanity checks on any member-provided requests before changing anything that directly affects these daemons. We use the grsecurity Linux kernel patches, per-user firewall rules, disk quotas, ulimits, and other tricks.
# You can save money. You get all this for a price lower than most commercial hosting plans. We split costs evenly among members. Currently the co-op pays about $200/mo., which comes out to less than $5/mo. per person and dropping as new members join.
# You can benefit from existing infrastructure. We take the time to brainstorm the best ways to set up our shared server resources. When you join, you find a fairly complete environment that should be prepared to respond to your needs, even those you might not initially realize you have. If not, then we can come up with a solution and save some trouble for the next person in your situation.
# You get the usual benefits of professional hosting, without having to manage all the details yourself. Our servers are hosted at professional colocation facilities. Tech support staff are available 24 hours a day. We have redundant Internet connectivity. There is an elaborate power backup system that includes diesel generators. Unlike many informal hosting setups at people's homes or offices, ours is fully legal; we are not violating an ISP's terms of service or testing the patience of an employer.
# And last but not least, everything runs on Open Source software!
