Most of the membership are not able to reclaim VAT on their subscriptions. However, since the decision taken at this meeting means there will be no subscription fees for at least the next two years, it is definitely advantageous for the club to continue being registered, so we can reclaim VAT on hosting fees, domain registration etc.
We discussed the proposal, which described "cloning" Alice, Lorina and Violet's configurations into single VMs to be owned and paid for severally. This to address the issue of declining membership and hardware maintenance.
Stuart pointed out that:
Severally owned servers might produce technical issues if they ended up being heterogenous. The issue of some members using more/less resources than others in the current arrangement is useful as it allows for some flexibility. Maintaining individual hosts might be problematic for some.
It was decided that we should stay jointly owned, but "clone" the current virtualized hardware configuration to virtual servers. These to be hosted by Jump Networks's VPS system rather than on our hardware running Proxmox.
Reasons for this were noted as:
a. It solves the problem of ongoing hardware maintenance and depreciation, Telehouse trips and potentially disruptive Proxmox upgrades.The move was therefore agreed in principle.b. It addresses to a large extent the problem of declining membership. In the future should we wish to move to own hosts severally as per Jonathan's original proposal, it would be relatively easy to do from there (assuming members stayed with Jump).
c. It reduces our running costs to the point where b. is much less of an issue in the medium term than our current hosting arrangement.
ACTION: Although we have six months to do the migration work before having to pay Jump for next year. planning for this should start as soon as possible on the mailing list.
2. Proxmox
Our Proxmox installation is now out of support. We don't have to renew our licence (which falls in January) as we can run it as is until we move off the hardware.
3. We should verify what our notice period is with Jump.
ACTION: David to investigate
4. Alan Truelove overpayment
Alan Truelove appears to have paid an extra subscription by mistake on his standing order to the club. Efforts so far to contact him have failed.
ACTION: David said he has a phone number he can try.
5. Subscription
Our statement of accounts show we have enough in the bank to pay for at least two years of hosting under the arrangement as outlined in our decision. It was therefore decided that the subscription for this year would be zero.
1. Stuart is the only one using the tradeline.org.uk domain and offered to transfer it to him if need be. It was decided that we can keep it jointly owned for now as the fee was £12.59 this year, and was automatically renewed using our debit card mandate on 25th September.
The meeting when then brought to an end.