OVH monitors customers' servers and investigates if they stop responding to pings, unless you opt out of this. I'm guessing they were looking at this system to make sure all their customers' machines came online again after the incident.
In Canada, we have a debit card network called Interac and can use it to send an "e-Transfer" to anyone else with a Canadian bank account using nothing more than their email address or phone number + a shared secret to claim the payment. Some number of free e-Transfers per month is typically included with bank accounts.
Interac solved the P2P payments problem for every social group that I'm in there.
Not all hosts are US-based, though; some hosts in other countries prefer to get a court order in their own jurisdiction before taking action against a customer.
The terms "nonprofit" and "not-for-profit" are unfortunate misnomers. Like any other company, nonprofits can offer gainful employment and will eventually bankrupt if they never turn a profit.
AFAIK, Mozilla has the structure they do because the IRS frowns upon charities (which is shorthand for "tax-exempt corporation") engaging in business-like activities but is fine with charities owning for-profit companies as a source of income (and like any shareholder can do, direct the for-profit company to benefit its owner).
Regional differences may be relevant here: in Canada, you can incorporate a nonprofit corporation and later apply for charity status (which restricts the company's possible activities in exchange for a 0% income tax rate) but it's completely optional.
In the US, on the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, one has to establish a for-profit entity first and then apply to the IRS to recognize it as a charity (which is a lengthy process). The words "charity" and "nonprofit" are interchangeable in the US for that reason.
If the concept of a non-charitable nonprofit exists in your jurisdiction, you can get the benefits of a nonprofit structure (ie. no owners) without restricting the company's activities, minus tax exemption and being able to issue tax receipts.
For context: I founded a non-charitable nonprofit in Canada; I'm not super familiar with the US side of things so I'm happy to be corrected.
That's exactly what a nonprofit is. Nonprofits are corporations like any other, with a few key differences:
- Instead of shareholders, nonprofits have members. Members don't own the corporation (no one does) but control it insofar that they hire-and-fire its directors.
- Memberships normally can't be sold, and nonprofits have no equivalent to dividends.
- There are stronger conflict-of-interest protections, preventing officers from signing cheques to themselves or otherwise using the corporation's resources for their personal benefit - at least without someone else's approval.
A typical setup for nonprofits is to tie memberships to being a director, so that current board members choose their own successors. This is known as a "self-perpetuating board".
I'm in the same boat. My self-taught experience inspired me to pursue a CS degree. The degree did put me in a serendipitous position that led to a number of great industry opportunities but personal growth was my main reason for starting it.
FWIW, I'm studying in Canada and paying my way through school with internships.
I see federal incorporation as a "sane default" but this is what I know that favours provincial incorporation:
- The bureaucratic details differ between the various provincial jurisdictions and the federal one (like the one I mentioned with requirements for the makeup of the board). This could make a particular province's corporate rules a better fit for your business than the federal ones.
- That provincial incorporation is cheaper can matter for local businesses that have no intention of expanding nationally.
- Some provinces may require corporations from other jurisdictions (other provinces or the federal jurisdiction) to "register extraprovincially" to operate there, at extra cost. This is avoided by incorporating locally.
- If your business name is already taken by a provincial corporation in another province, you may have an easier time creating a provincial corporation by the same name than a federal one.
*
> obligatory "I'm not an accountant or tax expert" note
Taxes... I'm still figuring those out but CRA allows corporations to file in USD [1]. To the best of my knowledge, a Canadian corporation that only has Canada-resident employees and shareholders, and doesn't own property or servers in other countries, only has to deal with Canadian taxes. Expect to fill out a few W-8BEN-E forms to assert this. Depending on what your company does, you may have to charge your Canadian users sales tax.
American bank accounts are the only way to get USD out of a PayPal account; PayPal will refuse to send anything but CAD to a Canadian bank account, regardless of what currency the account holds.
Since my organization mainly operates with USD, and many of its paying users really like PayPal, a US bank account was a necessity.
As for gotchas... be aware that directors cannot hire-and-fire each other unless they also happen to be the corporation's voting members or hold its voting shares. This might be weird to wrap your mind around if you've only been a sole proprietor before, and is why I advise consulting with a lawyer if you plan to split up control.
There's no equivalent to LLC's in Canada so you'll need to create a corporation up here. You can incorporate in the federal jurisdiction or a provincial one; you'll want to read the relevant acts that you'd be incorporating under to figure out the differences. BC corporations, for example, require at least one director to be a BC resident; federal for-profit corporations, on the other hand, require 25% of the board to be Canadian citizens.
I also went through the Canada Business Corporations Act and Not-for-profit Corporations Act a few times; they lay out the bureaucratic details you need to be aware of.
The most awkward part was opening a US-based bank account afterward; BMO Harris was one of very few US banks I came across that was willing to talk shop with a Canadian company (I'd love to hear if anyone knows of any other foreign company-friendly US banks).
If you name yourself as the only director and shareholder (or voting member, in the case of a nonprofit), you still have to hold board and shareholder/member meetings but they'll be very straightforward since you'll be their only attendee. _Definitely_ consult with a lawyer if you're contemplating a voting structure that extends beyond yourself or the directors.
For creating a nonprofit in particular, you may be able to get pro-bono legal advice through an organization like Access Probono (http://accessprobono.ca). Corporations Canada also offers a super-useful By-law Builder tool which gives you "sane defaults" for the corporation's structure: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cd-dgc.nsf/eng/h_cs04734.html
I'll vouch for OVH as a great choice - I've been a customer there for several years. Their phone support is awesome and you get a ton of hardware and bandwidth for your dollar.
Nope - it is a fee for money that travels between PayPal users in different countries. It's about 1% for Canadian accounts, depending on the payment's source or destination [1].
+1 for "running your own". I have a cPanel license on a personal server and it handles a lot of the rigamarole. Once you have DKIM and SPF set up, it practically runs itself.
The network your IP is in makes a difference. My mail server is currently at OVH, which is a good enough neighbourhood for Mailjet to have built an email business there.
I very occasionally have an email bounce back (once a year or less). The bounce message typically includes information on exactly why it bounced and how to contact the receiving server's operator to figure it out.
The vast majority of the work goes into the the initial setup, which takes an evening if you're using a packaged mail stack. [1]
[1] If you want a free packaged mail stack, here's a FOSS one: http://www.iredmail.org I have no experience with it but have heard good things.
OVH specializes in dedicated servers (https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/) but they offer an API for ordering them and can deliver many of them within a couple of minutes. They have a number of "cloud"/managed offerings as well if you browse around their site. They have datacentres in France and Canada, and are currently bringing up new ones in the US, Australia, and Singapore that they hope to launch by the end of the year. I've been a customer for >3 years now and have been very pleased with their service and support.
OP mentioned a desire to work with bare metal/do IaaS their own way, and dedicated server providers are awesome for that. Conversations about infrastructure are often about "cloud vs. running our own datacentres!" and renting dedicated servers is an interesting middle ground - you get a ton of hardware and bandwidth for your dollar and maintaining the hardware isn't your problem. You give up per-hour billing but you could very well still save money - it's a serious alternative to VPS providers like DigitalOcean.
I empathize and find your weekend activities relatable. Answer a question about your weekends with that and you might just find someone else who spends their free time "being productive". :-)
If you like the idea of self-hosting your transactional email server, check out Cuttlefish[1][2] - it's a slick open-source solution for this. We spun it up with a dedicated IP and gradually warmed it up to ~13k emails/day over several days. It's been smooth sailing and incurs no additional monetary costs.
Source: am an OVH customer