My Idea 1:
- We provide this forum to help you find other users who are interested in a dedicated server.
- We will send out an email to our mailing list (thousands of people, some which may not even be clients yet) in about a month announcing this new idea, and to visit the forum for more information.
- We would only allow the server to be shared among 10 people or less. This means that if you already are close to 3 people, you could each pay a steeper price for the server monthly, but you would be very confident in your purchase and surely reep great benefits.
- The payment method would have to be by one PayPal account. You have to work the "financing" of the server out amongst yourselves. And for example, if 10 users shared the base server we offer, you would only pay $11 a month. The only cons would be, making sure the payment gets to the person in charge of the PayPal account, and not disrupting service of the server at ANY time as a courtesy to your neighbors (who are sacrificing privacy of their own dedicated server, in the interest of paying a lower price and acting responsibly with others who share a common need).
- Each user would have to sign a document that we will write up that explains each person is responsible for what pain they inflict on the server.
If you cause the OS to need a reinstall or other work done after you've done something less than perfect, it would be a direct payment to us and your other server neighbors would not be involved.
- If the users of the server you are sharing are not that Linux savvy (yet!) there should be no way that your personal files (ones not displayed on your site in any way) will be viewed, unless they change your password. Changing passwords of someone else on the server is completely against the rules and you would be suspended from the server. Do not do anything harmful toward any other user of the server or try to access their files. We sincerely hope no one interested in this idea would have a bone in their body guilty of even thinking about that. You share this server with others, but you do not look, touch or do anything to their files unless you have permission from them.
- The person who manages the payment each month will also be the only person permitted to change the root password. That person can only change it after contacting all other users of the server.
- That same person is the only person that can send us support requests. If you are not that person, you must tell he/she what question you have about your server- then they relay it to us. Or, post here in the forum first if the question is not a very critical one.
- If anyone abuses the server in any way, we have the right to suspend their account in order to protect the other users. This however, will be the tricky part, as that means a payer of the server will be no more if their suspension reason is one that cannot be mended to allow access to the server again.
Basically, we need to do a test run with this type of system first, a beta if you will... and then after a few months of seeing how the first group of dedicated server sharers goes, then we can officially announce that we offer this method to all of our users.
I am sure many of you know there are systems called Virtual Private Servers. The software to do that costs money to run on these servers, and would basically make us not able to evenly split the price among the users.
Virtual private servers... now that is a completely different arena that we want to get into as well. But we can't talk about that yet! Just talk about my Idea 1, thanks. :1openarms