Membership

Cooperatives are member-owned, member-governed businesses that operate for the benefit of their members. By becoming a member, you will have a say in how the cooperatives offers its products and services and also receive special benefits that can only be available through the cooperative business model.

Each hosting account and domain name purchase comes with a free webhosting.coop membership. As a member, you will enjoy special benefits such as access to our community TownHall, digital voting rights, access to our community support, viewable online board meetings, free educational classes, discounted pricing, and higher quality of products and services.

The membership lasts the duration of your web hosting plan or when your domain name expires. Memberships are renewed with the renewal of your web hosting plan or domain name. If you decide to cancel before your membership is over, you will be refunded remaining costs left in your membership.

We include membership for free in all of our web hosting plans and domain name purchases. If you would like to be a member without purchasing web hosting, you most certainly can. Memberships cost $25/year. You will then have access to all of the cooperative benefits including access to our membership townhall and online board meetings where you can vote on important issues that affect the cooperative.

Cooperatives are voluntary organizations, open to all persons able to use their services and who are willing to accept the responsibilities of membership without consideration of gender, social status, race, political affiliation, religion, nation of origin,, age, or physical disability. When you sign up for a web hosting plan, domain name, or membership, we will contact you and ensure that you will not be using our services for anything that could violate our “Terms Of Service:, (Ex. Spam, Click Bait, Illegal activity). Since you will be part owner in the cooperative, we ensure that the services you will be offering through our platform will be ethical and moral. Click here to find out what we will not allow on our platform and what disqualifies your to have a WebHosting.coop membership.

The WebHosting.coop Community Townhall is a member-only online forum which allows our members to interact, discuss, and vote on important topics that affect the cooperative. It also acts as an archive to important material such as online board meetings, transparency reports, and any other important related material. Members can also find community support to some of the issues they may be experiencing. Members can also directly speak to other members who are offering the same type of services and build new kinds of partnerships.

Members can vote on a variety of different topics. For example, members can vote on new kinds of services to be added or changes they would like to see in their current service. (Ex. New kinds of cloud configurations). Members can vote on almost any topic except anything that would negatively affect the cooperative. (Ex. Excessive price drop)

Once a month, WebHosting.coop holds an online digital board meeting. All members are invited to watch the meeting. In this meeting, all votes from the Community TownHall will be openly discussed. The board will then vote on the topic and decide where the changes will fit within the Co-op’s priorities and distinguish how and when the changes will occur. The board’s responsibilities are to ensure that no one vote will hurt the cooperative in any way while making sure that the requests from the members are met. If members do not like the decisions of the board, then they can submit another vote to overturn the decision. If the vote gets a ⅘ majority from all the members, the decision will be overturned.

Online board meetings are held once a month unless a vote occurs to change the frequency of the meetings. Meetings are usually held at the end of every month.

Meetings will be held online via video conferencing and recorded. A link to the live video conference will be placed in the Community TownHall and also emailed to all of our members. Recorded board meetings will be archived in the Community TownHall for later viewing.

Since WebHosting.coop is a non-profit cooperative association, all profits are redistributed back into the company to increase the quality of service to our members. This means your web hosting account will have greater redundancy to ensure that your website is always running at optimum speed and is never down. An example would be with our shared web hosting services. Each shared web hosting server is backed by 2 other backup servers to ensure optimum uptime. Also, we limit each shared server to 250 users per server where traditional web hosting companies will fill each server with 2000 users. This ensures that your site will not go down or suspended in case you get a spike in traffic.

Members will also have more server resources for the price. We are able to offer more powerful dedicated servers for less cost. Members will receive discounted pricing for their services.

All of WebHosting.coops profits are divided in a few ways. The majority of the profits will go back into providing the customers with a higher quality of service at lower costs. At the end of the year, the remaining profit will be voted on by our members in order to decide which non-profit charities to give the profits to. Members will decide how much and to which non-profit to fund. This is our way of giving back to the community.

Members will have access to special transparent reports which will be archived in the Community TownHall. Transparent server reports will disclose all member’s' website addresses to everyone who resides on the same server in order for our members to know who they share their server with. Transparent server reports will also show resource usage from all members on the same server. Email blacklist reports will also be reported to ensure that no user abuses email by sending spam. Members can also vote on new kinds of information they would like to see in the transparency reports.