Based on a number of concerns (privacy, longevity and abrupt cancellation of service), a few tech-savvy friends and I have thought about forming a tech co-op. Initially it would be focused on email services, but could branch out into other hosting. What might be some of the difficulties attempting this on widely-distributed commodity hardware? How big should a co-op get before privacy again becomes a concern? Would a legal contract among participants be required? I understand the motivation for it, but feel it immediately adds a layer of bureaucracy that puts a damper on the initiative. This is probably something, once tested and planned out, that can be replicated by others. Figure it might be worth a good discussion.
Towards privacy, longevity, and independence, the private cloud would ideally be located in a distributed fashion on our own local hardware, i.e. no colocation or rackspace/aws. We would use open source cloud management/provisioning tools. But, allow flexibility and varied hardware and hypervisor (within reason) architecture/vendor selection if possible without sacrificing inter-hypervisor HA/Failover/Sharing of CPU/Memory/Storage.