A
adamc
Guest
I and a group of others have been running a private Internet hosting cooperative for a while. We split the costs of colocating a server professionally. We would like to expand our service to the general public, but feel that we would need to become a legally recognized entity to do that.
The reasons that we see for needing to do this are:
* Liability protection
* Avoiding having an individual be the legal owner of a hosting account and hardware that are, in practice, the shared property of the group
* Allowing payments to the organization instead of an individual
First of all, do these (or others) seem like compelling reasons to create a legal entity for ourselves? If so, how do you recommend that we go about this? We will have no "income" or "employees." We are not interested in making a profit and will continue to take in money only to cover month-to-month costs. We basically just want a legally recognized conglomeration of our users for the purposes of money and liability. We've considered incorporating, but we would be a very inactive corporation, so I don't know if it would be worth the paperwork.
Thanks,
Adam
P.S.: I haven't included any information on what state I'm in because this entity wouldn't really have a physical location (i.e., we could choose a state of incorporation based on other factors). We have users throughout the world. I happen to be located in California, for what that's worth.
The reasons that we see for needing to do this are:
* Liability protection
* Avoiding having an individual be the legal owner of a hosting account and hardware that are, in practice, the shared property of the group
* Allowing payments to the organization instead of an individual
First of all, do these (or others) seem like compelling reasons to create a legal entity for ourselves? If so, how do you recommend that we go about this? We will have no "income" or "employees." We are not interested in making a profit and will continue to take in money only to cover month-to-month costs. We basically just want a legally recognized conglomeration of our users for the purposes of money and liability. We've considered incorporating, but we would be a very inactive corporation, so I don't know if it would be worth the paperwork.
Thanks,
Adam
P.S.: I haven't included any information on what state I'm in because this entity wouldn't really have a physical location (i.e., we could choose a state of incorporation based on other factors). We have users throughout the world. I happen to be located in California, for what that's worth.