I am checking this forum out almost every day, so I stumble on the occasional request for a custom VPS plan. The general idea is that everyone has high expectations and wants as many resources as possible for very little money, nearly instantaneous response time to tickets and of course %99.99 up-time (again, for very little money). And God forbid one of us providers are using prorated billing or the math is off by one cent after entering a promo code due to rounding because we will never hear the end of it. Never mind if we're actually working on stopping a DDoS attack against your VPS, because instead of gratitude we get yelled at followed by a swift forum post and public humiliation. Yes, providing good service is hard work, and all providers here that have been around for a while know this.
So I had this brilliant idea for those of you with special needs: with hardware prices on the decline why not get your own server and share it? A few community members can talk to each other, agree on the hardware, virtualization technology and management software (e.g. SolusVM), divide the server into an equal number of VPS servers and share them amongst each other along with all the expenses. I am sure that 10, 20 or even 30 to 40 members of this community could accomplish this.
It's just an idea, and I am curious what you guys think about it. Personally I think it has merit and that some of you here should look into this possibility.
Update
This is an example that I came up with, and I didn't want it to get lost amongst the comments:
A Xeon E3 server with 32GB server with 4 x 256GB SSD drives, LSI + BBU controller, a /29 and /26 subnet is about $300 per month. This requires only 42 members for it to pay for itself and of course stay at $7 or less per member. Of course, in order for each member to get at least 1GB of RAM (real or not) it will require that members oversell resources ... to themselves. I hope that they won't get angry at each other.