[olug] Community Colo Project

Thu Apr 2 20:44:03 UTC 2009

Being a legal entity (an LLC or an incorporated nonprofit) will allow
opening a bank account under the business name.  That'll greatly
simplify the financial aspect by funneling all the money through a
central account.  Easier to pay the bills, easier to bill clients,
easier all around.  Oh, and with an LLC, no one is personally liable.

Now comes the million-dollar question - nonprofit or LLC?  Nonprofit has
quite a few hurdles and requires large amounts of manpower and
oversight.  An LLC from what I understand is much easier to operate.

Curtis LaMasters wrote:
> Why would we even need to be an entity?  I guess I could somehow see
> it as an easier way to bill each other.  Depending on what the total
> cost to do this is, auto billing could be setup to go to an OLUGish
> type account where one of the members would pay
> Cogent/CoSentry/Cox/etc.... Unless I'm totally lost it sounds pretty
> easy to automate.  If we can get a developer talked into it, we could
> start colo.olug.org as a billing portal. :)
> 
> I would be in for 5U (1x1U Server and 1x4U server).  I would still
> obviously need to run it past the wife.
> 
> Curtis LaMasters
> http://www.curtis-lamasters.com
> http://www.builtnetworks.com
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 2:48 PM, Dan Clough <dclough at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Pain-in-the-ass way it is.  I had articles for a nonprofit typed up, I'll start working on articles for a LLC.
>>
>> What should we call it?  The usual "(insert city here) Community Colocation Project" or do we want something that hasn't been beaten into the ground?
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: "Charles.Bird" <charles.bird at powerdnn.com>
>>
>> Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 14:43:20
>> To: Omaha Linux User Group<olug at olug.org>
>> Subject: Re: [olug] Community Colo Project
>>
>>
>> From my experience, the pain in the ass way is usually the best way.
>> The pain in the ass way might be for us to form our own entity.
>>
>> I'm not a 100K per year super Linux admin(yet?) if I made even 70k I'd take
>> it on with my own responsibility.
>> All I can do is contribute cash and time, and some equipment.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Dan Clough <dclough at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Figuring out a pricing structure is a priority at this point in time,
>>> but that's currently on hold until we find out what the damage is for
>>> the Pinpoint cage and power circuits.  With all the pledges of equipment
>>> we've seen so far, I doubt our expenses will exceed that of the cage
>>> space, power and bandwidth.
>>>
>>> While we're on the subject of finances, we *really* need to decide what
>>> we're going to do about legal entities.  I've been juggling ideas which
>>> include forming our own nonprofit corporation, piggybacking on another
>>> organization or just dumping it on one person's shoulders.  The last one
>>> is an obvious no-no as I doubt anyone would want to take sole fiscal
>>> responsibility of the venture if it went tits-up.  Ideas?
>>>
>>> Dave Rowe wrote:
>>>> Phil Brutsche wrote:
>>>>> People should be allowed to bring in anything they want (given
>>>>> reasonable hardware constraints - ie 4U or smaller rackmount) as long as
>>>>> they maintain their machine(s) properly and bay their bill.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm just making sure people are performing reality checks, we shouldn't
>>>>> be getting any grandiose ideas and ordering a 50Mbps line under the
>>>>> assumption that there will be that many "clients".
>>>>>
>>>>> Dan Clough wrote:
>>>>>> Well, that's just it.  Hopefully it won't just be us, hopefully we
>>>>>> can get people who want colocation or even local web hosting but
>>>>>> can't find it... Even if it means inviting the WUG in... ;)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> We want enough capacity for us to fill and for any other "clients"
>>>>>> we'll hopefully bring on board.  20Meg should be fine.
>>>> With that in mind, does someone who has an idea (ballpark is even
>>>> valuable) as to what the monthly cost (+ setup? ie, to help cover the
>>>> Cogent installation?) per U is?  Then, people who might use it can
>>>> evaluate (reply to the list) with what they'd want (no obligation).
>>>> Then, you'd have a better idea of how big the client base is, and what
>>>> the estimated usage would be.
>>>>
>>>> I've throughly enjoyed following this, and see myself as a potential
>>>> 'client' of this, but without knowing the monthly cost, I'm not fully
>>>> 'sold' on it.
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>>
>>
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