Announcing the Canadian Independent Hosting Alliance

If you run a small hosting company in Canada, you already know the problem. You're Googling part numbers at 2am. You're buying a single switch off eBay and hoping it works. You're paying retail for 4 drives when the guy down the hall just ordered a pallet of 200. You have no procurement department, no vendor manager, and no leverage.

We've been there. Every small operator has. So we built something about it.

What is CIHA

The Canadian Independent Hosting Alliance is a group of small, independently owned Canadian hosting and infrastructure providers who talk to each other, help each other out, and buy hardware together. No billion-dollar telecoms. No VC rollups. No resellers. Just people who actually own racks and run networks.

This is not an industry association. We're not putting Bell and Rogers at the same table as a 3-person hosting company and pretending that's useful. CIHA is specifically for the people who are doing the work — not the ones who own the fiber plant and set the wholesale rates we all pay.

What Members Actually Get

• Hardware group buys — Someone needs to buy servers, switches, optics, drives. They post it to the group. If others need the same thing, we order together and split the volume discount. We built a full group buy system in the member portal with automatic product fetching from eBay, Amazon, and Newegg — paste a link and it pulls the title, image, price, and specs.
• Colo rate negotiation — If multiple members are at the same facility, we approach the DC together. A datacenter cares a lot more about 10 racks across 5 companies than your single half-cabinet.
• Private community — A members-only group where you can ask how someone handles abuse tickets, what billing system they use, or whether that vendor is worth dealing with. No public forums, no noise.
• Customer referrals — When a customer needs something you don't offer, send them to a CIHA member instead of losing them to OVH. Keep the revenue in the indie ecosystem.
• Verified member badge — A badge for your site that says you're a vetted, independent Canadian operator. Helps when you're competing against companies 100x your size.
• Direct peering — If we're in the same building, a cross-connect is cheap and easy. Keep traffic between members local instead of hairpinning through transit.

Who Can Join

You're eligible if you own or lease physical infrastructure in a Canadian datacenter, your company is independently owned, and you provide hosting, colo, transit, or infrastructure services as a core part of your business. You should be a small operation — if you have an HR department, you're probably too big.

You're not eligible if you're a major telecom (or owned by one), a VC-backed rollup buying up indie providers, a pure reseller with no physical infrastructure, or you don't have any presence in a Canadian datacenter.

Why exclude the big telecoms?

Because they don't need help. Bell owns the fiber. Rogers owns the cable plant. They set the wholesale rates we all pay. This group is for the people buying transit from them, not the ones selling it.

The Rules

CIHA has six rules. They're simple and we enforce them:

1. Don't compete dirty — No customer poaching. No undercutting a member's quote that was shared in the group.
2. Keep member info private — Vendor quotes, pricing, internal discussions stay in the group. Period.
3. Don't misrepresent the alliance — The badge means you're a vetted operator. Don't use it to imply things you're not.
4. Operate honestly — No ignoring abuse reports, no illegal content, no scams.
5. Pay your bills — If you're in a group buy, you pay your share. If you owe a member for remote hands, you pay.
6. Stay independent — If you get acquired by a telecom or VC rollup, your membership ends. No hard feelings.

Why We Built This

Running a small hosting company in Canada is lonely. It doesn't have to be. The Canadian indie hosting scene is full of smart operators who've figured things out the hard way. CIHA is just a way to make sure we're figuring things out together instead of alone.

Membership is free during the founding period. Applications are reviewed manually — we're not trying to be exclusive for the sake of it, we just want to make sure everyone in the group is actually a small operator.

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