I'm a bit hesitant about this. If we hire some of the existing volunteers, we would partly be paying for what we now get in volunteer time. And if we hire people from outside, will not lead that to problems with people who do the same thing for free?
If we lose volunteer work for what we get in paid work, the price of paid work might well be a lot higher than what it is at first sight.
Andre Engels
The issue as I see it, is that we are now asking too much of too few volunteer developers and none of them can be on-site at the colo. Thus I think it is the time to consider hiring one full time or two of them part time to perform server maintenance tasks for us that currently are not done in a timely manor (esp the on-site stuff). Our budget is now so big ($US80,000 last quarter) that the addition of one or two employees under contract would not be too much of a burden. Neither would some up-front relocation money.