Ok, so I’m pricing out the server to build.
I’m thinking we want at a minimum
As far as which Linux flavor to run, I’d prefer CentOS but am open to anything. Slapping a VPS handler on top of it all would be awesome. I know nothing about how to do that. I can probably pick my friends brain on it.
Moving to a new thread so we can really geek out on it!
Why CentOS? Does it share the security model with Fedora server? Because I was surprised when I read up on the default state a server comes in, one has to whitelist ports.
Does that decide the underlying OS? I am very sure I know lots of peeps that can speak to setting up a VPS machine, so let me ping them… 
I believe some OSes are easier than others to run VPS mgmt on. I could totally be wrong.
I priced out what I had talked about above…
I beefed up the memory to 32GB, since that is was we’d utilize more. That could do ~30 1GB-memory instances just fine.
Hmm, another option is to have just 1 1TB SSD drive (since 30 VPS w/30GB storage is only 900GB), and then have two 4TB spinny disks, raided. People could use that for more block storage.
Holy… that could seriously work for me… Greg mentioned https://iocoop.org/ as a hosting coop that friends have experience with. Their rates are for 2U, presuming no additional power requirements, would be ($65 * 2) * 12 = $1560/year.
Okay, let me go look at my records, see what that means in terms of my hosting, and figure out how much of that pie I want to reserve.
I’m excited! To be clear though, I don’t know yet what the operational costs will be to have it sitting in my friends colo. I assume they’ll be pretty low, but not sure. I will maybe know more tomorrow, but definitely by next week.
Yeah, I hear ya. I just needed a baseline.
BTW, let’s consider that for a moment, shall we?
($1560 / 30 slices) / 12 months = $4.33/month/1GB
So basically DO prices, on top of initial hardware costs… damn, it is really hard to be autonomous and survive in capitalism, ne?
I am still down! 
I do like the idea of block storage, but I don’t think we should put any moving parts (if that is what you meant by “spinny”). Those will be the first to die, and it will also add vibration to the chassis. I know the price point is much lower storage with SSD, but it is probably worth it to do something a similar set up for smaller drives.
Although, an alternative is we figure out block storage in a different way. I hardly use any storage on all my 30GB instances, which is a common storage point for 512MB or 1GB VPS.
Let’s start discussing how we want to price this out to, um, members? Customers? See, that would definitely help! But also, we don’t have to slice it like other places, ya know? Maybe we can just make bespoke VPS configs.
Maybe we share resources, like having a dedicated database server with built-in private networking! Suddenly all the WordPress sites use the same web and database server, because we set it up well! I am very interested in that kind of hosting.