Brian Modansky, the former creative director and founding member of HostGator, is now co-founder and president of a remarkable new initiative within the web hosting industry, WebHosting.coop. The new shared hosting service launches to provide transparent and community-driven website solutions for both individuals and businesses.
Based on the idea that the best way to benefit users is by evolving cooperative business technology, this new non-profit organization would provide quality shared hosting with an emphasis on member participation. Headquartered in Austin, TX, WebHosting.coop services members all over the globe.
Collaborating via an online software called Town Hall, members are given the ability to submit, vote and communicate on key issues that directly impact the cooperative’s direction. In addition, members will have the ability to participate in scheduled events, review transparency reports, take on-line training classes, and communicate with other members who share the same physical resources.
Transparency and flat fee membership
Because transparency is one of the core tenets of WebHosting.coop, any person who needs web hosting can become a member for a flat annual rate. For $100 a year, members receive shared disk space and bandwidth, as well as unlimited sub-domains, email accounts, FTP accounts, and MySQL databases. Additional shared hosting services offered by WebHosting.coop include domain names, secure SSL certificates, and IP addresses. Members will also benefit from a 99.9% uptime guarantee, 24/7 live technical support, and a thriving online community.
All websites of WebHosting.coop’s members will be in Level 3 Gateway Datacenters while their account management, backups, and redundancy will be in the Rackspace Cloud.
Address common shared hosting issues
WebHosting.coop has taken steps to address several common problems within the shared hosting industry including oversold servers, inadequate backups, lack of server redundancy, and unnecessary ad placement. The coop resolves these issues by reducing the amount of users per each shared server, backing up members data every other day, providing multi-regional DNS and e-mail redundancy, and will only advertise up-sells which members vote in.
In addition to providing a reliable and transparent shared hosting solution, WebHosting.coop also plans to educate members on how to build a website by utilizing freely available open source software. According to co-founder Brian Modansky, “We must not be limited by the ways of our past but instead should focus on positive and innovative solutions through the sharing of ideas and with the cooperation of our digital community.”
