First, if you really don't have a few bucks extra a month, then yes, you should go with the cheapest large-scale hosting company you can find. We're not really the same kind of business as they are, and we probably won't be able to beat them on price, though it depends on your specific needs. We know that even if something is "worth a bit more", that is irrelevant if you don't have a bit more to spend. We wish you luck.

On the other hand, there are very good reasons to trust your hosting to a company like Electric Embers. Some of them will even save you money that you might have spent in other ways, while others produce less tangible but still important benefits for you and your world:

• Not a faceless corporation -- here to stay, not for sale: We're a small group of actual human beings, working together in a democratic, consensus-driven cooperative. You can reach us by email or phone, we're friendly, we're flexible, and we're nonprofit people as much as techies. We're doing this because we love it, not to get rich. We have a great business plan that allows us to support ourselves (on modest nonprofit-type salaries) and to maintain and improve our systems without borrowing money or having to answer to investors. We will never suddenly disappear overnight with all your data (some of our current clients have had this experience), and we will never sell out to a faceless corporation for a fat paycheck, either of which situations can end up costing you hassle and money.

• Responsive, helpful tech support: This is a requisite claim for any service provider, but really, it's true -- see our Clients page for a rotating selection of user comments. We respond to most questions within a few business hours, and urgent problems often within a few minutes. And the people you reach are the same people who wrote this site, run the servers, fix the bugs, add new features, and handle the billing and set up new accounts. We've also done a lot of tech consulting for small-to-midsized nonprofits, as part of the Tech Underground. So we all wear many hats and can pull answers out of any of them; there will be no canned responses, transfers to another department, or mandatory troubleshooting scripts. Your call will not be monitored for customer support purposes.

• Security, privacy, reliability: On general principles, and also because of the particularly sensitive nature of the work of many of our clients, we place the greatest value on both the security of our systems and the privacy of your data. We will protect your data to the best of our ability, in every context. See also our privacy policy. Our services work, all the time, or at least 99.9% of the time, with no lost data or flakiness. All user data is backed up every night and can be restored for several days. Of course there is the occasional problem with a particular service or even a whole server, but we fix things quickly, and we're only getting better at it. We always notify all affected users before any scheduled maintenance, and you can see our complete system history.

• Environmental sustainability: We're serious about making responsible resource use choices. We are 100% powered by renewable energy, and the carbon offsets we purchase through NativeEnergy help build distributed wind, biogas, and solar projects that create sustainable economic benefits for Native Americans, Alaska Native Villages, family farmers and rural communities. We address hardware waste and toxicity with donations to Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and by re-using hardware whenever we can. And we run as paper-free an enterprise as possible.

• Spam and virus filtering that actually works: Spam-filtering restores the usefulness of email, saving you time and possibly adding years to your life thanks to a decrease in vengeful rages, and virus filtering protects you from a dangerous Internet. Every provider offers such filtering these days, but they are not all equal, and our results are as good or better than those achieved by the biggest and best operators out there.

• Better list service: Our email list system is much more full-featured and better suited to certain kinds of organizations (those needing a "branded" look, delegation of responsibility to different administrators, many small lists, good Web-based archiving and information sharing, even integration with their own live membership database) than most of the list services out there. We use a different underlying list management package than most other providers, and we've also done a lot of modifications to make it work better for our clients.

• Sliding scale rates: We charge on a sliding scale, so the larger orgs who are paying a bit more than they might elsewhere are in effect subsidizing the service of poorer orgs and individuals. Some of our users are charged on a donation-only basis, so everyone is subsidizing them. We hope thereby to contribute to the general diversity and robustness of the sector we serve.

• The people's economy: As you're probably aware if you're reading this, money that goes to small or locally-owned businesses gets pumped back into the same economy that sustains most of our society, whereas money that goes to the big companies largely fattens a few already wealthy corporate executives and investors. As a worker cooperative, we share our revenue equally and have no outside investors. As a business and as individuals, we tend to spend our money whenever possible at smaller, locally-owned businesses.

• Free and open-source software: We use only free and open-source software, and we contribute back both financially and via code development and improvements to the software projects that are most important to us and our users.

• No advertising: You will never see any advertising on our own Web site or added by us to any Web site or email we host. We have never done any traditional paid advertising in any medium. We may one day experiment with extremely targeted advertising as a way to make sure we reach everyone who'd like to work with us, but our goal is to continue growing organically and by word of mouth, as we have so far. We want to put your monthly fees towards running your service, not towards acquiring more customers.

• distribute, send or cause to send any unsolicited bulk email using Electric Embers systems;
• violate any local, state, national or international law, except in the context of thoughtful, nonviolent civil disobedience;
• infringe the rights of any third party, including but not limited to intellectual property rights and privacy or publicity rights;
• interfere with or disrupt Electric Embers services, those of our users or any other person or service, including but not limited to hacking, portscanning, banner checking or other invasive investigation of machines;
• make excessive use of Electric Embers services, including but not limited to network bandwidth and computer system resources;
• violate or cause Electric Embers to violate the terms of our upstream providers' Acceptable Use Policies.

• Sending spam is a problem because receiving spam is a nuisance. It's part of our mission to identify and destroy spam, so we certainly don't want to be adding to the problem by generating it.
  
  
• Sending spam is a problem because the Internet is quite rightly not friendly to spammers; when our clients send spam, it reduces the effectiveness of their and our other clients' legitimate email by reducing our reputation as a sender of legitimate mail and thereby the likelihood that our clients' mail will reach its intended recipients. The exact mechanism is varied and complex, but email service providers like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL carefully monitor the ratio of spam to legitimate mail (as reported by their users) received from all domains and servers on the Internet and block or divert mail from those who exceed the thresholds they set. Third parties like Spamcop, SORBS, and Spamhaus aggressively identify perceived spammers and share their databases, which are used by smaller email providers to block or divert messages from senders with bad reputations. Reliable email delivery is a top priority for us, so anything that interferes with it gets our attention.