Honestly, you had me at "data protection", lol.

A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine on a server.  It's basically like taking 1 really massively awesome server and splitting all the resources into smaller pieces.

My VPS is a cloud VPS, meaning that it's like having 50 massively awesome servers, and splitting them up into several smaller pieces.  I have one small piece of 50 massively awesome servers, and they all contribute to making the site load really fast.  Go to my site, http://moneymamba.com to see how fast it loads, then click to an individual page--almost instant.  Everything but the off-site things like tweetmeme etc. loads really fast.  Obviously, a VPS cannot speed up the things that are hosted offsite.

If we were to do this, everyone would get their own cPanel account.  You know, what you see when you to to yoursite.com:2082...

Basically, the benefit in going in together is that we get economies of scale.  To put it simply, we could all go buy 1 20oz Coca-Cola from a store for $1.25.  Or we could all pool our $1.25s together to get $10, and buy 20 of them. 8 vs. 20.  Pooling obviously makes sense.

The same is true with hosting.  I'm currently using ASO's cloud VPS: http://www.asmallorange.com/ho.....ing/cloud/

Check out the various options and how they scale.  Each time you double the price of the VPS, you get like 3 or 4 times the amount of computing power/bandwith/storage space.

Jason explains it really well. Basically, in pooling together we'd get "banging" hosting for a really, really low price.  FreeForBroke does too, but the burst of traffic wouldn't be a problem at all because this isn't an ordinary VPS.  It's a cloud VPS, meaning that we'd have a piece of many servers, not just one.

On the topic of security:

Unfortunately, you'd have to trust that I'm not going to go in and screw up your site for the fun of going in to screw your site.  You'd also have to trust that someone isn't going to get a hold of a 128-bit secure password to log into the VPS.

Anyone who went in on this would have my full legal name, my address, and business office address. I have no real incentive to screw you guys over, but hey, I can understand the concern. LOL

On the topic of data protection, the servers are auto-failover.  Meaning that they cannot go down.  If one server of the 50 in the cloud goes down, the other 49 have the data and nothing is lost.  We can double down on security by having automated backups made of everyone's account every few days.  

Bottomline:  If we were to pool our money together, we'd all get really ballin' hosting at a much better cost than anything out there.  

The caveats would be if something happened to his server or if one person in the shared environment had a big traffic burst.  But for the price it could be worth it.

The way I understand it, JT's got one that he's willing to share, and the more people who get on board, the cheaper it is to upgrade to a really banging server.

We are currently getting our hosting free but we will run out of storage space (500 mb) or (maybe) get enough traffic we exceed our bandwidth max - so i'll need to make a change eventually.

Our site is pretty slow right now - i'm guessing a combo of too many plugins, using a free theme (atahualpa) and the free hosting.

Also, would their techs move everything for me?  As my 6 year old comment suggests, I wouldn't know how to do anything behind the scenes...

Thanks in advance for your time JT!

Then comment here or PM me.  I made an offer to Suba, but the more the merrier.  In putting many sites on a VPS, we can all reduce our costs while increase our services (have technicians deal with the nonsense of the technical side ).  

Obviously, all of our sites will be faster for it too–consider it a cloud within a cloud. By having more people, there will be more coverage for high-traffic days (think front-page of…Digg, or something) for an individual site.  Every time the service is scaled up, there is more RAM/CPU cycles available 24/7 at a lower price.  As I said earlier, the service is based out of a The Planet datacenter; we're not going to clog one of their pipes. ;)

Costs would be minimal.  $2/mo for a unique IP per person, plus whatever the appropriated costs of the service is.  This is not a profit-making venture for me; everything will be 100% transparent between everyone who might participate.  In the end, I just want better quality at a lower price. 

So, if you're interested, PM me.  I guess I'll just keep this open-ended for a month, at which point all the sites can be moved and costs figured out.

On the other hand, I've heard good thing about their "proactive service" plan for $15/mo.  They'll email you once a month, talk to your about your site/s, and see what kind of updates/services they need to run to keep everything in tip-top shape. 

P.S. The ASO people you talk to before you have an account aren't the most helpful people in the world.  Send an email to billing@ or abuse@ to get the techs.