GAIA Host Collective
added 05/11/10
If you are reading this issue of the Co-op News, chances are that you are familiar with food cooperatives. You may also know about energy co-ops, insurance co-ops, credit unions, and various other forms of cooperative enterprise. But what other co-ops are out there? In this series we’ll feature some unique cooperatives that are creating successful niche business models while still making a difference.
For every website you see, there is a company that hosts the thing—and hosting is very serious business.
Web hosts offer shared or dedicated server space for all the files of a website, subsequently making the site available to all the surfers of the World Wide Web. To meet the needs of its clients as well as each client’s site visitors, the host company must be secure and reliable, with topnotch technical support, spam and hacking protection, and rare or preferably nonexistent downtime.
With so much on the line, it’s a market dominated by high-tech, for-profit firms. But like any other market, it’s also a place where a brave cooperative can find a home—like GAIA Host Collective.
Organized as a limited liability corporation under the umbrella of the cooperative principles, GAIA Host Collective, LLC, is a socially and environmentally driven, worker-owned collective providing reliable internet hosting services including domain registration, shared server hosting on Open Source and Windows platforms, and dedicated server hosting.
GAIA Host is based in Greenfield, Massachusetts, but its worker-owners work virtually. The main server systems are co-located in data centers in Boston, Southern New Hampshire, and San Francisco.
The social mission at GAIA Host is driven by its collective members’ own personal missions to be part of the positive change and vision for a cooperative culture. As a result, GAIA is 100 percent worker-owned and collectively run, donating 25 percent of its server resources to non-profits and non-governmental organizations that align with GAIA’s social and environmental missions. The collective promotes the development of open-source software, primarily purchases services and products from locally owned, worker-owned, and/or unionized businesses, and when possible, accepts alternative payment arrangements such as barter and local currency.
GAIA Host’s environmental mission is core to its decision-making process. The organization matches its expenses for grid-purchased electricity and grants those funds to local renewable energy projects, purchases computers from used sources as much as possible, uses only 100 percent recycled paper, and works to minimize total paper consumption as part of its business. The personal habits of worker-owners are also part of the equation, with many bicycling to work, walking to work, driving cars that run on bio-diesel and vegetable oil, growing their own food, and generally minimizing consumption.
Want to learn more? Check them out online at www. gaiahost.coop.
